Mr. Wallace Blick, of the ANABOLIC tattoo, was a techno geek with an edge.

When Joe climbed out of the van, Slick was groaning but not yet conscious. His legs pumped, a flurry of kicks, as if he were a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits, and his cool red sneakers tore divots from the grass.

Neither of the men in Hawaiian shirts had returned from the desert scrub beyond the hill.

Joe hadn’t heard any more gunshots, although the terrain might have muffled them.

He hurried to his car. The door handle was bright with the kiss of the sun, and he hissed with pain when he touched it.

The interior of the car was so hot that it seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. He cranked down the window.

As he started the Honda, he glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw a flatbed truck with board sides approaching from farther east in the cemetery. It was probably a groundskeeper’s vehicle, either coming to investigate the gunfire or engaged in routine maintenance.

Joe could have followed the road to the west end of the memorial park and then looped all the way around to the entrance at the east perimeter, but he was in a hurry and wanted to go directly back the way he had come. Overwhelmed by a feeling that he had stretched his luck too far, he could almost hear a ticking like a time-bomb clock. Pulling away from the curb, he tried to hang a U-turn but couldn’t quite manage it in one clean sweep.

He shifted into reverse and tramped on the accelerator hard enough to make the tyres squeal against the hot pavement. The  Honda shot backward. He braked and shifted into drive again.

Tick, tick, tick.

Instinct proved reliable. Just as he accelerated toward the approaching groundskeeper’s truck, the rear window on the driver’s side of the car, immediately behind his head, exploded, spraying glass across the backseat.

He didn’t have to hear the shot to know what had happened.

Glancing to the left, he saw the man in the red Hawaiian shirt, stopped halfway down the hillside, in a shooter’s stance. The guy was as pale as a risen corpse but dressed for a Margarita party.

Someone shouted hoarse, slurred curses. Blick. Crawling away from the van on his hands and knees, dazedly shaking his blocky

head, like a pit bull wounded in a dog fight, spraying bloody foam from his mouth: Blick.

Another round slammed into the body of the car with a hard thud followed by a brief trailing twang.

With a rush of hot gibbering wind at the open and the shattered windows, the Honda spirited Joe out of range. He rocketed past the groundskeeper’s truck at such high speed that it swerved to avoid him, though he was not in the least danger of colliding with it.

Past one burial service where black-garbed mourners drifted like forlorn spirits away from the open grave, past another burial service where the grieving huddled on chairs as if prepared to stay forever with whomever they had lost, past an Asian family putting a plate of fruit and cake on a fresh grave, Joe fled. He passed an unusual white church — a steeple atop a Palladian-arch cupola on columns atop a clock tower — which cast a stunted shadow in the early afternoon sun. Past a white Southern Colonial mortuary that blazed like alabaster in the California aridity but begged for bayous. He drove recklessly, with the expectation of relentless pursuit, which didn’t occur. He was also certain that his way would be blocked by the sudden arrival of swarms of police cars, but they still were not in sight when he raced between the open gates and out of the memorial park.

He drove under the Ventura Freeway, escaping into the suburban hive of San Fernando Valley.

At a stoplight, quaking with tension, he watched a procession of a dozen street rods pass through the intersection, driven by the members of a car club on a Saturday outing: an era-perfect ‘41 Buick Roadmaster, a ‘47 Ford Sportsman Woodie with honey-maple panelling and black-cherry maroon paint, a ‘32 Ford Roadster in Art Deco style with full road pants and chrome speedlines. Each of the twelve was a testament to the car as art: chopped, channelled, sectioned, grafted, some on dropped spindles, with custom grilles, reconfigured hoods, frenched headlights, raised and flared wheel wells, handformed fender skirts. Painted, pinstriped, polished passion rolling on rubber.

Watching the street rods, he felt a curious sensation in his chest, a loosening, a stretching, both painful and exhilarating.

A block later he passed a park where, in spite of the heat, a young

family — with three laughing children — was playing Frisbee with an exuberant golden retriever.

Heart pounding, Joe slowed the Honda. He almost pulled to the curb to watch.

At a corner, two lovely blond college girls, apparently twins, in white shorts and crisp white blouses, waited to cross the street, holding hands, as cool as spring water in the furnace heat. Mirage girls. Ethereal in the smog-stained concrete landscape. As clean and smooth and radiant as angels.

Past the girls was a massive display of zauschneria alongside a Spanish-style apartment building, laden with gorgeous clusters of tubular scarlet flowers. Michelle had loved zauschneria. She had planted it in the backyard of their Studio City house.

The day had changed. Indefinably but unquestionably changed.

No. No, not the day, not the city. Joe himself had changed, was changing, felt change rolling through him, as irresistible as an ocean tide.

His grief was as great as it had been in the awful loneliness of the night, his despair as deep as he had ever known it, but though he had begun the day sunk in melancholy, yearning for death, he now wanted desperately to live. He needed to live.

The engine that drove this change wasn’t his close brush with death. Being shot at and nearly hit had not opened his eyes to the wonder and beauty of life. Nothing as simple as that.

Anger was the engine of change for him. He was bitterly angry not so much for what he had lost but angry for Michelle’s sake, angry that Michelle had not been able to see the parade of street rods with him, or the masses of red flowers on the zauschneria, or now, here, this colourful riot of purple and red bougainvillea cascading across the roof of a Craftsman-style bungalow. He was furiously, wrenchingly angry that Chrissie and Nina would never play Frisbee with a dog of their own, would never grow up to grace the world with their beauty, would never know the thrill of accomplishment in whatever careers they might have chosen or the joy of a good marriage — or the love of their own children. Rage changed Joe, gnashed at him, bit deep enough to wake him from his long trance of self-pity and despair.

How are you coping? asked the woman photographing the graves.

I’m not ready to talk to you yet, she said.

Soon. I’ll be back soon. When it’s time, she promised, as though she had revelations to make, truths to reveal.

The men in Hawaiian shirts. The computer-nerd thug in the

Quake T-shirt. The redhead and the brunette in the thong bikinis. Teams of operatives keeping Joe under surveillance, evidently wait­ing for the woman to contact him. A van packed solid with satellite-assisted tracking gear, directional microphones, computers, high-resolution cameras. Gunmen willing to shoot him in cold blood because.

Why?

Because they thought the black woman at the graves had told him something he wasn’t supposed to know? Because even being aware of her existence made him dangerous to them? Because they thought he might have come out of their van with enough information to learn their identities and intentions?

Of course he knew almost nothing about them, not who they were or what they wanted with the woman. Nevertheless, he could reach one inescapable conclusion: What he thought he knew about the deaths of his wife and daughters was either wrong or incomplete. Something wasn’t kosher about the story of Nation­wide Flight 353.

He didn’t even need journalistic instinct to arrive at this chilling insight. On one level, he had known it from the moment that he saw the woman at the graves. Watching her snap photographs of the plot markers, meeting her compelling eyes, hearing the compassion in her soft voice, racked by the mystery of her words — I’m not ready to talk to you yet — he had known, by virtue of sheer common sense, that something was rotten.

Now, driving through placid Burbank, he seethed with a sense of injustice, treachery. There was a hateful wrongness with the world beyond the mere mechanical cruelty of it. Deception. Deceit. Lies. Conspiracy.

He had argued with himself that being angry with Creation was pointless, that only resignation and indifference offered him relief from his anguish. And he had been right. Raging at the imagined occupant of some celestial throne was wasted effort, as ineffective as throwing stones to extinguish the light of a star.

People, however, were a worthy target of his rage. The people who had concealed or distorted the exact circumstances of the crash of Flight 353.

Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina could never be brought back. Joe’s life could never be made whole again. The wounds in his heart could not be healed. Whatever hidden truth waited to be uncovered, learning it would not give him a future. His life was over, and nothing could ever change that, nothing, but he had a

right to know precisely how and exactly why Michelle and Chrissie and Nina had died. He had a sacred obligation to them to learn what had really happened to that doomed 747.

His bitterness was a fulcrum and his rage was a long lever with which he would move the world, the whole damn world, to learn the truth, no matter what damage he caused or whom he destroyed in the process.

On a tree-lined residential street, he pulled to the curb. He switched off the engine and got out of the car. He might not have much time before Blick and the others caught up with him.

The queen palms hung dead-limp and whisperless in the heat, which currently seemed to be as effective an embalming medium as a block of fly-trapping amber.

Joe looked under the hood first, but the transponder wasn’t there. He squatted in front of the car and felt along the underside of the bumper. Nothing.

The clatter of a helicopter swelled in the distance, rapidly grow­ing louder.

Groping blindly inside the front wheel well on the passenger side and then along the rocker panel, Joe found only road dirt and grease. Nothing was concealed inside the rear wheel well, either.

The chopper shot out of the north, passing directly overhead at extremely low altitude, no more than fifty feet above the houses. The long graceful fronds of the queen palms shook and whipped in the downdraft.

Joe looked up, alarmed, wondering if the crew of the chopper was looking for him, but his fear was pure paranoia and unjustified. Southbound, the aircraft roared away across the neighbourhood without a pause.

He hadn’t seen any police seal, no lettering or insignia.

The palms shuddered, shivered, then trembled into stillness once more.

Groping again, Joe found the transponder expansion-clamped to the energy absorber behind the Honda’s rear bumper. With batteries, the entire package was the size of a pack of cigarettes. The signal that it sent was inaudible.

It looked harmless.

He placed the device on the pavement, intending to hammer it to pieces with his tyre iron. When a gardener’s truck approached along the street, hauling a fragrant load of shrub prunings and burlap-bundled grass, he decided to toss the still-functioning tran­sponder among the clippings.

Maybe the bastards would waste some time and manpower following the truck to the dump.

In the car again, on the move, he spotted the helicopter a few miles to the south. It was flying in tight circles. Then hovering. Then flying in circles again.

His fear of it had not been groundless. The craft was either over the cemetery or, more likely, above the desert scrub north of the Griffith Observatory, searching for the fugitive woman.

Their resources were impressive.

TWO

SEARCHING BEHAVIOR

1

The Los Angeles Times booked more advertising than any news­paper in the United States, churning out fortunes for its owners even in an age when most print media were in decline. It was quartered downtown, in an entire high-rise, which it owned and which covered one city block.

Strictly speaking, the Los Angeles Post was not even in Los Angeles. It occupied an aging four-story building in Sun Valley, near the Burbank Airport, within the metroplex but not within the L.A. city limits.

Instead of a multiple-level underground garage, the Post pro­vided an open lot surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with spirals of razor wire. Rather than a uniformed attendant with a name tag and a welcoming smile, a sullen young man, about nineteen, watched over the ungated entrance from a folding chair under a dirty café umbrella emblazoned with the Cinzano logo. He was listening to rap music on a radio. Head shaved, left nostril pierced by a gold ring, fingernails painted black, dressed in baggy black jeans with one carefully torn knee and a loose black T-shirt with the words FEAR NADA in red across his chest, he looked as if he were assessing the parts value of each arriving car to determine which would bring the most cash if stolen and delivered to a chop shop. In fact, he was checking for an employee sticker on the windshield, ready to direct visitors to on-street parking.

The stickers were replaced every two years, and Joe’s was still valid. Two months after the fall of Flight 353, he had tendered his resignation, but his editor, Caesar Santos, had refused to accept it and had put him on an unpaid leave of absence, guaranteeing him a job when he was ready to return.

He was not ready. He would never be ready. But right now he needed to use the newspaper’s computers and connections.

No money had been spent on the reception lounge: institutional-beige paint, steel chairs with blue vinyl pads, a steel-legged coffee

table with a faux-granite Formica top, and two copies of that day’s edition of the Post.

On the walls were simple framed black-and-white photographs by Bill Hannett, the paper’s legendary prize-winning press photo­grapher. Shots of riots, a city in flames, grinning looters running in the streets. Earthquake-cracked avenues, buildings in rubble. A young Hispanic woman jumping to her death from the sixth floor of a burning building. A brooding sky and a Pacific-facing mansion teetering on the edge of ruin on a rain-soaked, sliding hillside. In general, no journalistic enterprise, whether electronic or print, built its reputation or revenues on good news.

Behind the reception counter was Dewey Beemis, the combi­nation receptionist and security guard, who had worked at the Post for over twenty years, since an insanely egotistical billionaire had founded it with the naive and hopeless intention of toppling the politically connected Times from its perch of power and prestige. Originally the paper had been quartered in a new building in Century City, with its public spaces conceived and furnished by the uberdesigner, Steven Chase, at which time Dewey had been only one of several guards and not a receptionist. Even a megalomaniacal billionaire, determined to prevent the dehydration of his pride, grows weary of pouring away money with the tap open wide. Thus the grand offices were traded for more humble space in the valley. The staff had been pared down, and Dewey had hung on by virtue of being the only six-feet-four, bull-necked, plank-shouldered security guard who could type eighty words a minute and claim awesome computer skills.