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.That doesn't matter right now, the voice said.Hell it doesn't.The usual influx of nutballs confessing, or offering to reveal various conspiracies, or Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlboth had died down long ago, it was better than three years since the murders.The voice was a man's,not old, Standard American accent, perhaps a hint of Midwestern rasp.The murderer's name is Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, it went on.It she is responsible for several otherkillings.She's currently resident in the Bahamas.Excitement punched him in the gut.Closed file, my ass.This one really knew something.Maybe she didhave help.Maybe they're turning on each other.He suppressed the speculation; facts first.How do you know this, sir? Rodriguez came in, and Carmaggio made franticsend a car to the traceaddress motions at him.That doesn't matter either.What does matter is that she's coming back.Yes?Back to New York.If you check, you'll find she's bought up the property where the murders tookplace, through front companies.She'll be coming to New York shortly, and dealing with an investmentfirm named Primary Belway Securities.The Fischer killing.He'd been with PBS.Hell, so's Jenny.Hell, she's inthe Bahamas.He suppressed astab of worry.Nobody's going to mess with a bunch of investment bankers.It's extremely important that this.person not be allowed access to New York, the voice went on.I am beginning to get seriously pissed off with this turkey,Carmaggio thought.The tone was desperatelypatient, the way you talked to a slightly retarded child.Plenty of people talked that way to cops; he wasused to it.He got the feeling that this bird talked toeveryone that way, however.We're always concerned with the safety of New York and its citizens, he said soothingly.Why don't youcome in and tell us all about it?The answer was a chuckle; the first hint there was an actual human being on the other end of the line.Not until we have an understanding, Lieutenant.I think you've figured out that this is.not a usual case,at all.I think you may be ready to understand what's really going on here.But it has to be in a way thatdoesn't endanger either of us.No contacts that leave any recordings, no involvement of higher authorities,and no meetings in places where we might be under observation.Yeah, and I have to wear a rubber nose and give the secret handshake,Carmaggio thought.If he's soparanoid, what does he think this line is?That might be possible, sir.Where should we get in touch?I'll contact you, in a day or two.SirAnd Lieutenant.anyone in contact with Ingolfsson is in extreme danger.All right, you dickhead, I want some answers! Now! Stop bullshitting me or Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlThe line went back to the dial tone, with no click of a broken connection.Henry Carmaggio sat lookingat the receiver in his hand for a moment, then replaced it with exaggerated care.The alternative wasbeating it on his desk until the pieces were too small to hold.That wasjust the thing I fucking needed to hear, he said.Jesus, you get the blue-and-white dispatched?Jesus Rodriguez's thin brown face came around the doorjamb.No trace,patron.Fuck, Carmaggio said in a weary sigh.The new process was supposed to be automatic, with thenumber and location of the phone showing up on a map.Nothing?A glitch.It gives us our own number.He tapped the pedal again, rewinding the tape.Let's listen and see if there was anything I missed.The tape hissed.Carmaggio waited, calmly at first, then with a heavy sinking feeling.There was nothingon it, nothing at all.The weird shit was starting again.***Kenneth Lafarge bought a soft pretzel with mustard and sat on the edge of the fountain in WashingtonSquare Park.The wounds didn't hurt anymore.It was a cold raw day, slush and lowering skies.A homeless man shuffled by, fingerless gloves holdingtwo bulging plastic bags.Behind him loomed an off-white mock-French triumphal arch, and behind that awedding-cake minor skyscraper.Pigeons hunched their wings against the cold.A man in chain-studdedleather did too, his pinched gray face stubble-covered and shuttered.Two girls passed, talking andlaughing; one wore a nose-stud.Ken smiled at them, at all the pulsing streams of people.There were nearly as many people in this State of New York as in the whole of Samothrace.Ilike it.Icouldn't live here permanently, but I like it.He'd been country-raised, and even the capital city ofJefferson was a manicured garden next tothis.He remembered green-black tuftbush and Terran sage,riding down a canyon and the skin-winged majesty of agruk arrowing by overhead, eyeing the herd ofsheep but wary of his rifle.I'd go nuts here in twenty years.But.His scanner caught traces of conversations, checking for keywords: in Spanish, Chinese, Italian, inAfrican tongues extinct centuries before the Last War inhis history.Nobody on Samothrace had spokenanything else but English since the first generation of settlement.For that matter, every other language hadbeen dying out on Earth by the end of the twentieth century by compulsion in the Domination, throughmarket forces and policy in the Alliance for Freedom.I do like it here.These people were sloppy, restless, childish, self-indulgent.They had no moralseriousness.But they're alivein a way we never were.Not even before the Last War.His ancestors'America had been an anxious giant, mobilized for generations against a menace that made the Cold Warthey'd had here look like a love-feast.Compared to this America his had been grim, puritan, uniform.He imagined the Square broken and desolate, buildings shattered hulks.A weapons platform hovering inthe Manhattan sky with the bat-winged dragon of the Domination blazoned on its side; a wolf-facedghouloon trooper crouched where he sat, cradling a particle-beam rifle and gnawing on a human arm. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlNever, he said softly, getting to his feet and strolling with his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets.Heattracted a few glances.By local standards six-foot, crop-haired blonds with his build in neat businesssuits were exotic.The problem was the asymmetry of the positions.Ken looked at the glossy of the Draka's face again; hisequipment had extrapolated it to a 3-D image and matched it against the files.This had to be one of theold ones; subtle clues in the bone structure marked it as the first or second generation ofdrakensis.Centuries old, then.Unbelievably experienced.And not limited by fear of detection.Itwanted to bedetected, to call the ghoul-horde through to feast.I can't let that paralyze me, he murmured.An anchoring beacon wasn't all that difficult to make.The first expedition through a planetarysurface-level molehole on Samothrace had managed to cobble one together from the equipment they'dbrought.Then they'd broadcast until a new molehole was latched on giving the USS a whole newSamothrace, in a solar system humans had never visited.As far as they could tell, inthat continuum Earthhad been scoured free of life sometime in the twenty-first century.Spaceborne instruments could scan aplanet fairly closely, even across 4.2 light-years.The oxygen content ofthat Earth's atmosphere haddropped far enough to make it plain even the algae in the oceans were gone.So the Draka here could mess up the landscape as much as it needed to.The more the better, in fact itincreased the possibility of a unidirectional lock-on by thedrakensis scientists working from the otherside.I'm only constrained in whatIdo, he thought meditatively.How much does this policeman have figured out? he asked himself.Once he'd let the locals know, there was no going back.And they'd be exposed; he'd have to push themto the front, give the minimum of backup
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