"Frank," Ruche said, "there was no sex involved. She just beat him half to death."

"She did a lot more than that." He looked around the table. "You've all heard it before: rape is an act of violence, not lust. It's about anger, and power. The perp takes free will from his victims, forces them to recognize him as the one with the power. That's where the pleasure comes from, pleasure that's sexual in its intensity. But a man who jumps a woman, beats her, drags her into an alley, and forces her to fellate him at knife point isn't doing it because he's horny." He looked at the young man's face on the billboard screen behind Ivana. "If rape was nothing but forced sex, it wouldn't haunt the victims. It's being forced to submit… cooperate… contribute to your degradation."

"It's not the same for a man…"

But you don't sound too sure, Gerry. "It's exactly the same for a man. Males just aren't usually raped by females." He jerked a chin towards the kid on screen. "You think this is sex to him? You think he can even think about sex right now? Hardly able to breathe, his balls feeling like hot coals in her hand? That's what the second kiss was all about. The moment they met, she forced him to give her something he'd reserve for a wife or girlfriend… if he had a choice."

"Thought you used to be a beat cop, Frank. Not a detective."

You know my file as well as I do, I don't doubt. "My father was a chief of detectives, Gerry. He brought a lot of work home." He looked at Ivana. "If I'm right, we're going to see a chain of actions intended to make him feel helpless and force his compliance. That's how she broke him so quick. Let's see the part where they went into the bathroom." A moment later, he said, "Stop. Whose hand is on the knob?"

"His, but he was the only one with a hand free."

"She's fast enough. She could have opened it without losing control of him. Instead, she made him do it." He looked at the scene. "He's got to know what's waiting on the other side of that door. But she doesn't give him a choice. He follows his torturer into the chamber… and even opens the door for her." He turned to Phillips. "Did she really let him keep his gun?"

The team leader said, "Long enough to make a point, at least. She shoved him inside, and turned her back on him to lock the door. He drew his weapon and trained it on her. He didn't just roll over, sir." That last comment, Colby was sure, was for Ruche's benefit.

"Then what?"

Phillips gave a tiny head shake. "She looked him in the eye, with his sighting dot between her eyebrows, and told him all his gun was good for was pissing her off. Then she moved, too fast for him to track, and safed it with a finger behind the trigger. She forced him to turn his gun on himself – slowly, as if she were savoring it. In debrief, he told us he was sure he was going to die, that she was going to force him to shoot himself. Instead, she stopped, with the end of the barrel an inch from his eye, and told him what she was going to do."

"Which was?"

"Torture him for information. Give him a message to deliver to higher authority, if he lived."

"What sort of message?"

"A declaration of war, sort of. She said that they were going to start ambushing pickup teams and assassinating high-level IO officials. She said that IO people should start looking for hiding places."

So that's why guys like Bradley and Simmons are here; they're dead weight in the discussion, but they've got enough rank to be targets. He shook his head. "That's crazy."

"I have to disagree," Ivana said. "This is no crank threat."

"No, Ma'am. I don't dismiss the danger. Even Lynch's kids could cause enough trouble to curtail our operations if they turned guerilla on us. But it's still crazy. The biggest advantage the Gens have in hiding from us is that their existence, and the search for them, is a closely held secret. That limits what we can do to locate them, and obliges us to keep our pickup operations unobtrusive. But they throw that away if they start making public attacks on IO personnel; they'll be impossible to cover up. With their existence known, they cease to be a possible asset and become nothing but a threat. In which case IO has a propaganda campaign ready to launch that would paint them as a bigger threat than neo-Nazis with nuclear weapons. The whole country would be looking for them. They'd never be sure of a hiding place again. It'd be the end of them."

"Well then," Ruche said silkily, "as a last resort, I suppose we could instigate an incident ourselves."

Colby's gut tightened. "Better be sure we're really up against all of them before you do that. Not only will we throw away any possibility of using them in the future, we'll find ourselves in a war with a bunch of fantastically dangerous people with nothing to lose. The casualties would be horrendous."

"But they'd lose."

"Yes. Like I said, it's crazy." He turned back to Phillips. "What happened after that?"

"The account's a bit… disjointed, sir. He sort of drifted in and out, and not just from the pain." The man shook his head. "The kid was good, tough, had the training. He would have handled any normal interrogation okay. But she didn't play by the rules." Phillips looked directly at Colby. "He said she seemed to know the answers before she asked the questions, and she caught him every time he tried to lie, even when he pleaded ignorance to something he might not have known. Like the whole interrogation was just an excuse to bust him up. She acted like she wanted to kill him so bad it thickened the air. She'd be almost to the point of doing it, and get a grip and back off. She told him half a dozen times she wanted to keep him alive, but she kept threatening to cripple him for life."

"Give him hope, and take it away," Colby said softly. "Prepare him for the ultimate punishment, and grant him a reprieve. The power is all hers."

"She told him to bite his arm if he had to scream, because she wouldn't put up with him making any noise. Early on, she made him empty his stomach in the toilet."

Colby looked at Ruche. "Compliance and cooperation."

"When it was over… she fondled his buttocks, told him how much fun he'd been. Hinted she'd see him again."

Colby was glad Diehl was the one to say it: "Your ass is mine. You'll never be free."

"All right, Frank," Ruche said heavily. "I concede your point. I take it this method can't be duplicated by us?"

"Only if we've got a super-powered psychopath on the payroll." Come to think of it, though, we do. More than one, possibly. "What happened next?"

The hall camera showed the little blonde stepping out of the bathroom, just as another figure, a familiar redhead, appeared at the end of the hall. The pixie waited for her, and they spoke in front of the bathroom door. Ruche froze the image. "That's Fairchild," he said. "Pretty good timing, wouldn't you say? She even stopped for the shopping bags."

"It does look preplanned," Colby said thoughtfully. "But ambushing IO troopers who aren't hunting them… It just doesn't seem like Lynch's style."

"Perhaps they're doing it without his knowledge," Ivana suggested.

"Or maybe," Ruche put in, "he's out of the picture, and they're being run by the pixie."

Colby thought about Lynch's new-man appearance yesterday, as if all his burdens were lifted from his shoulders. No. He wouldn't give up the responsibility, not while he can still think and plan. "If he's out, where did this new player come from? And where's Lynch?"

Ruche raised his eyebrows. "She seems pretty ruthless."

Ivana said it for him. "Ruthlessness wouldn't be enough, Mr. Ruche. The man has survived more attempts on his life than I can count. I prefer to think this is happening under his radar."

"He's no fool, either," Diehl objected. "He must be keeping these kids close, else they'd have been caught. How could he not know they're up to something like this?"

Colby added, "And I find it hard to believe that these kids would walk away from…" He caught himself before he finished: the man who rescued them. "The man who's been sheltering them so well for two years."

Ruche looked sourly at the men seated around the table. Colby knew what he was thinking: the queue was thrown to the wind, and his control of the meeting with it. Colby hoped the man was smart enough to see that the meeting was picking up steam as a result. "There are ways to turn smart men stupid. Torture and brainwashing aren't this girl's only skills. Let's move on, and you'll see what I mean."

On the displays, the two girls moved down the hallway into the mall proper. The clip was a montage: angle and elevation changed frequently as the point of view switched from one camera to another. You got used to it. At the food court, the pair met Spaulding and the third Callahan kid, Sarah Rainmaker. A conversation ensued, and, from the looks on the girls' faces, the topic wasn't light. The little blonde addressed Fairchild, hands clasped in front of her, while the other two listened.

Ruche froze the image. "Look at this. Is it just me, or does she look like a ten-year-old who just lost her puppy? At this point, the kid Hale is still leaking all over the bathroom floor. Where's the cold-blooded monster that did that?"

"She's a chameleon," Colby said. "Must be."

"Say again?"

"It's a profiling term. Some people have a natural ability to size up a situation, and present themselves in such a way as to get what they want from the people they deal with. They're usually extremely intelligent and amoral, and gifted con artists."

"Which dovetails nicely with my theory. Watch this next bit."

On the screen, the tall redhead looked down thoughtfully at the chameleon, then touched her thumb to her tongue and stroked the little blonde's ear. Ruche stopped the recording again. "Can somebody come up with an explanation for that? Besides the one I'm thinking of?" After a moment of silence, he continued, "Now look at Callahan. She looks PO'd. Or jealous. I think we're looking at a triangle."

Colby raised his eyebrows. "Really."

"Really. Fairchild never had a boyfriend that we could find, but we have reports that indicate she's sexually experienced – and adventurous. We believe she seduced and later killed her recruiter, Julius Gierling, when she was eighteen. And Callahan's sexual preference is well known. We have video from the mall showing her and the chameleon arm-in-arm a couple times – once, after a joint visit to a lingerie shop where they made a purchase. I'm thinking that sex may be the angle she's playing with these girls. It wouldn't be the first time. It was once a common KGB ploy."

Colby opened his mouth, then shut it. He was sure Ruche was barking up the wrong tree; Lynch would never leave one of Alex's girls vulnerable to the manipulations of a sexual predator. But why correct him? Colby decided to see just how far off course Ruche would steer the meeting.

"Look at this'" Ruche went on. "The chameleon's passing out cash and plastic, probably running money. This was a planned op, for sure."

"Not planned enough," Colby couldn't help adding, since he was sure someone else would if he didn't. "Why didn't they have it on them to begin with?"

Ruche shrugged. "Maybe holding the purse strings is another way she keeps them on a leash. Or maybe she planned it alone, and maneuvered her girlfriends into a clash with our people." Colby recognized the trap Ruche was falling into: having formulated a theory, he was tailoring his observations to fit.

Ruche started the video again. "Okay, this is where the wheels start to come off. The Cheerleaders make a break towards their car. Trying to break contact, one of them – Spaulding, we think – takes down their closest tailchaser and then twenty seconds later our little changeling drops a man who tries to intercept them - the only fatality of the op."

Colby watched the event, moved as always by the suddenness of violent death. But the weapon the little blonde wrenched from the man's grip caught his eye. "Wait. Is that a Franchi he's packing?" A 12-gauge assault weapon, for a quiet surveillance in a public place? But as soon as he'd finished, he knew what Ruche's reply would be.

"He was one of yours, Frank. On detached duty. Guess he didn't feel comfortable without his favorite hand cannon."

For over thirty years, US intelligence agencies had been fighting a secret guerilla war against a succession of militant groups that thought that America was too fat and smug and ignorant to live, and that its people needed their eyes opened to the real world by a dramatic gesture. The jihadists were just the last of a long line, and not the most ambitious. Several times since IO had come into its own in the early seventies, its intelligence-gathering assets had ferreted out plots more horrendous than the 9-11 attack. As its successes had raised its status, and its secret finances had burgeoned, the Shop had equipped itself for direct action against the threats it uncovered.

There were many in the intelligence community who resented the ascendance of the upstart organization, and argued that taking on homicidal nutcases planning mischief lay outside IO's charter. Then IO had uncovered signal intelligence that indicated a radical group was planning an attack that would kill thousands, and shared it with the NSA. While the NSA, DIA, CIA, and FBI were still arguing jurisdiction and exchanging memos, Craven's teams had captured and disarmed two very sophisticated nuclear devices in Detroit and L.A. Before any of those agencies had done more than deliver briefs with their best guesses about the origin and extent of the terrorist threat, IO's fledgling X-Team raided an ancient caravanserai on the Afghan-Pakistani border, which turned out to be an assembly facility for nuclear weapons. Close by, they intercepted a group of men hurriedly moving nine more devices in various stages of completion. After Miles Craven had dined with the President, complaints about IO and direct action never rose above grumbles.

But the U.S.'s borders were porous, and the haters legion. The States, and its neighbors north and south, were infested with cells, some competing, some cooperating, some ignoring one another, with threat capabilities ranging from nuisance to terrifying. Planning Directorate uncovered plots faster than it could deal with them alone, but IO didn't play well with others. It handed off most of its cases to rival agencies and stepped away, but the very worst it turned over to its own strike arms: the Razors, who dealt primarily with threats inside U.S. borders; and the eight Expeditionary Teams, who covertly brought the fight to the foe overseas.

The men who signed on with IO's Operations Directorate were the best Craven could recruit: combat veterans with outstanding records and a wide range of skills. But they weren't supermen. Breaking up terror cells all over the U.S. was no less dangerous or stressful than duty in a war zone; doing it in secret doubled the strain on men whose presence and nerves were already stretched thin. Sometimes a battle-fatigued Razor would be rotated to softer duty until he stopped looking behind every door for someone to shoot. Riding herd on some IO bigshot should have been very soft duty indeed.

Colby looked at the frozen image: the face turned and tilted, blood flying away in an arc. If he had Ruche back it up a few seconds, a bit of study might enable him to recognize the man; Operations' strike forces weren't that large, and Colby had come up through the ranks and knew a lot of them. They might have even done an op together, saved each others' lives, even.

"He should have turned it in when he transferred, of course," Ruche said silkily. "But he's beyond reprimand now, and he paid a heavy price for his… training lapse, I'd say."

Colby felt the seat's pressure lessen, and forced himself back down. Ivana might tolerate bickering in a closed meeting, but not in front of subordinates. He locked eyes with the Security Advisor, and acknowledged the scoring of a point. But we're not done yet. Not even close. To cover his lapse, he said, "She didn't need to kill him. She'd already taken his weapon. Why him, and not any of the others?"

"He was about to turn Sarah Callahan into hamburger. I think her little girlfriend got carried away."

Keep repeating that baseless assumption, Gerry, and by the end of the meeting everyone will think it's proven.

The recording resumed. The four females sprinted down the hallway past alarmed onlookers, until the way ahead was blocked by armed men clearly shouting at civilians to clear out.

"Our new player is about to do some more heavy lifting," Ruche said. "Watch this. It plays like a Bruce Lee movie."

The scene showed a Security agent from the knees up wielding a large automatic. The man's movements and facial expressions showed that the image was in very slow motion. As he straightened his arm to fire, the chameleon popped into view in front of him, just as she had with her other victim. "Wait. Gerry, how far is this slowed down?"

"Ten-to-one. Quick, isn't she?"

"Yeah. What's the frame rate on these cameras?"

"Err, about a hundred per second. What-"

"Does she appear in every frame?"

"What?"

"Does she appear in every frame?"

"Well, why wouldn't she?"

"Hang on." He found the laptop's calculator.

"Mr. Colby," Ivana said, "what are you doing?"

"Trying to determine whether we should adjourn immediately and resume by teleconference." He crunched some numbers. "Okay. She crossed twenty feet in two or three tenths of a second, gives her a sprinting speed between forty-five and sixty-five miles an hour. Not impossible for a Gen." He looked up. "I was looking at the possibility that she might be able to teleport. If she has inside information, as her interrogation style suggests, and her threat is serious, and she can 'port…" He looked around. "Every department knows about this meeting. Nineteen of our top twenty people are in this room." The room seemed to cool as faces paled. "But if Gerry says she never disappeared from frame, then probably not." Bet he'll spend a tense hour looking over the video record after this meeting's over. Tie score, asshole.

It was easy to tell how many people in the room were familiar with Genactive capabilities: they were the ones who wore looks of relief instead of disbelief and incomprehension. Colby noted that the percentage was pretty damn small. He watched Phillips open his mouth, as if to say something, and shut it. "Okay, Gerry, we can move on."

Colby had once seen an extreme slow motion video demonstration of a car's airbag deployment. The bag had sprung out of the steering wheel, slapped the driver in the face and chest, and nearly deflated before the driver even reacted. He was reminded of it now, as the chameleon blurred into view in front of the gunman, spun neatly, and stood with her back against his chest with her hand on his weapon. He looked closely. Her child-sized hand rested partly over his on the grip, and her finger over his trigger finger. She swung the weapon, still in his hand but clearly in her grasp. The muzzle flashed, and only then did the man's face begin to change. It flashed again, and the man started to reach around her with his other hand. Her face, sighting on her next target, never changed expression. Her free arm came up over her shoulder like the arm of a trebuchet, and his face folded around the back of her fist like a freshly punched pillow. A small breathy sound filled the room.

After the agent crumpled, she pulled the big weapon out of his falling hand. She turned sideways with her back foot far behind her and her front leg deeply bent, and extended her gun hand, aiming in a curious one-armed stance that looked better suited to a fencer. The gun flashed twice more in quick succession, then, after a pause, once more. Ruche froze the image. "Great. Genactive, combat-trained, and a martial-arts expert besides. On the bright side, we should be able to track her through her training."

Colby turned to Phillips. "How was her aim?" Handling a big-bore pistol, and pushing against a man's arm besides?

Ruche started to answer, but Phillips said immediately, "Her first shot shattered the man's collarbone. Incredible luck, anyone would say, except she did the same to the second man. The boys were ducking for cover by then, but she still managed to shatter two men's pelvises with her third and fourth shots. The fifth man almost lost his arm at the shoulder – tried shooting around the corner with just an arm and an eye showing."

Ruche said, his voice brittle, "And then the Security contingent let them jog down the hall unhindered." He was clearly miffed that Colby had asked Phillips instead of him.

Phillips turned to the Security Advisor. "There were no more effectives between them and the garage, sir. Probably a good thing, since she still had two rounds in the clip when she ran out of targets."

"Too right," Diehl said, staring up at the image on the screen.

Ruche's lips thinned. "A very dangerous individual, I'll admit. But-"

"But not Gen," Colby said.