1

A machete slash severed her hand. Blood pulsed from the stump to splash the sorority-house door and security chain.

Peggy Miller, an eighteen-year-old freshman student of cinema at the University of Southern California, daughter of a New York advertising executive, stared with disbelief at the wound. As a lifelong television and movie addict, she had seen uncounted thousands of murders and mutilations. As a devotee of the horror genre, she had already made films of the macabre and terrifying, sometimes appearing in front of the camera, other times writing the script or operating the camera or serving as a makeup artist to create the images of suffering and mutilation and grotesque death.

Often she had giggled at the sight of movie blood splashing. She had twisted her face into a mask of manic rage and hacked at the other actors and actresses with plastic knives and axes. After the scene, they all laughed, the syrupy blood sticky on their bodies. Once, she had endured ten retakes of her own murder as the student director struggled to capture the veriteof vivisection by electric carving knife on Super-8. That evening, Peggy and a handsome young actor ended the shooting day with a private orgy in a Jacuzzi, licking away the sweet phony blood caking their hair and bodies, their lovemaking leaving a puddle of sweat and cinema blood on the tiles.

But now, a real wound spurted blood. As the image and the first horrifying sensations of pain registered in her numbed mind, she saw her hand on the floor. Fingers curling upward, the hand lay on the Persian entry carpet, its dead flesh a startling white against the colored designs of the hand-woven carpet.

The machete blade hacked again and again at the security chain. But the chain held. A voice that came from a throat that could not be human made a low, bestial grunt, then the door splintered. One attacker after another crashed through the broken door.

In the last seconds of her life, Peggy Miller faced a gang of punks beyond the imagination of any casting director. They wore the uniform of the streets: boots, black jeans, black nylon jackets, bandannas tied over their faces and hair. Their eyes stared out from the gap between the bandannas.

Psychopathic hatred raged in those eyes.

Even as her reflexes raised her arms to push away the monsters rushing her, as a scream rose in her throat, Peggy Miller surrendered to death.

They reduced her to a headless, armless corpse kicking with nerve spasms. As two punks continued hacking at the body, more of them rushed into the other rooms of the sorority house.

One punk ran into the white tiled kitchen. A young woman in a purple silk kimono turned from the refrigerator. Before her scream came, a machete blade axed through her brain.

A blaring stereo led two punks to a first-floor bedroom. Snapping the lightweight bolt with a kick, the punks saw two forms in two beds. The awakened sleepers jerked upright.

"Get out! What..."

"Who..."

Machetes ended the protests of the young women. Not content with murder, the gang boys continued chopping at the naked girls. Laughing as they hacked, they reduced the bodies to an intermingled mass of meat and entrails.

A scream pierced the rock and roll. In the living room, a young woman in a red velour sweat suit ran for the stairs. A shotgun blast tore her legs, throwing her down hard on the carpeted steps. Clawing at the carpet, she screamed when she attempted to crawl on her shattered legs. She suffered only a moment longer.

Rushing up to the bleeding young student, the masked punk pumped the sawed-off shotgun's action. She screamed at the grinning monster. He put the muzzle of the 12-gauge shotgun to her face.

Brains and bone fragments sprayed the stairs. Laughing at the gore, the gang punk sat down on the blood-soaked carpeting of the step. He kicked the headless body away. Taking a hand-rolled cigarette from his jacket pocket, he pulled down the red bandanna from his face.

It bore the scars of innumerable street fights. The young black man's front teeth had been knocked out by fists. Scar tissue hooded one eye, giving him a permanent squint. His breath whistled through a smashed nose. A knife slash had scarred his cheek and ear, the straight line disappearing into the matted hair under the bandanna that covered the top of his head.

Lighting the cigarette with a silver lighter stolen from a tourist in downtown Los Angeles — he sucked down a long drag of the drug. His eyes closed, his face went slack. The cigarette clung to his lip as he fell back against the steps. He exhaled and pulled down another drag.

For seconds he lay motionless. The glowing point of the cigarette burned into his chin, but he did not move. Finally, his breath escaped in a slow swirl of smoke.

One hand caressed the shotgun. His eyes opened. A piece of skin came away from his chin as he took the cigarette from his lip. He carefully stubbed out the half-gone cigarette.

Screams and sobbing came from above him. He turned to the sound, his lips pulled back in a rictus grin of broken and decayed teeth. The tendons and blood vessels in his throat stood from the flesh as a visible wave of loathing and psychopathic murder — lust moved through him. Somewhere on the second floor, a machete stopped the crying.

Laughing again, he pulled up the bandanna to cover his face. Through the thin cotton cloth, he could hear the laughter continue. As he pumped another shell into the chamber of his sawed-off 12-gauge and went up the stairs, he hissed, "Die, honky sluts…"

Raoul Valencia, a red-haired young Mexican from the state of Michoacan, turned the ignition key for the tenth time. But nothing. No response from the starter motor, no lights, no emergency blinker.

Only an arm's distance to his left, the headlights of Harbor Freeway traffic flashed past at sixty miles an hour. His boys — Miguel and Thomas — sat in the back seat, staring back at the onrushing traffic. His wife, Maria, held their youngest in her arms, as if to protect the baby girl from the rushing tons of metal threatening the Valencias with disaster.

When the old Buick's electrical system had failed, Raoul fought to guide the car out of traffic. Though he would not admit it even to Maria, that long moment, from the speed lane to the side of the freeway — without power, without lights, without brakes, the other cars skidding and swerving around him, his family so close to death — had been the most terrifying thirty seconds of his life. His mouth had gone dry with fear.

The sprint across the border at Juarez had been nothing. So what if the American federalestook him? It had been a quick bus trip across the border and another swim and run the next night. Nor had he felt fear during the long, anxious wait for the coyoteto smuggle Maria and the boys across. His brother had trusted the coyotewith his money and his life; his brother had crossed without a problem. No, Juan — the coyote did not abandon people to die in the desert. Nor did he molest the wives of other men. A man of honor. He earned his money honestly. Raoul had not feared.

But when the car quit! Ayiii!

By the grace of the Virgin, they had reached the safety of the roadside. Now to start the Buick…

He must do it before the highway police stopped to help him. What if they asked for his papers?

To lose it all now — capture in Los Angeles meant return to Mexico City.

No matter. Even if the American authorities sent him back, he would return.

Taking a flashlight from under the seat, Raoul waited until no headlights threatened him, then quickly left the car. He dashed to the front of the Buick. Untying the rope that replaced the latch, he threw the hood open.

The battery cable had broken.

No problem. Use a jumper cable to replace the battery cable. He wished bleakly that his neighbor from Haiti had accompanied him on this journey, because of the arrangement to use a car. Raoul had fixed Jean-Claude's wreck of a Chevy back home many times.

Haiti — now there was a problem. To be returned to Mexico was not good. A visit with relatives, then perhaps a week or month of travel before crossing the border again. But Haiti? Jean-Claude had told Raoul of the boats drifting in the ocean, of the many dying, of the fear of return to the torture chambers.

Raoul thanked God for his Mexican birth as he went to the trunk. He took out one of the jumper cables.

Headlights illuminated the rear of the Buick. Jumping aside, Raoul looked back to see a car slowing to a stop.

Highway police? A tow truck? He could not see through the glare of the high beams. He waited with his hands in sight — he did not want any pistol misunderstandings with the police.

Raoul Valencia never heard the shots that killed him. Thrown backward ten feet by the impact of a double-barreled blast, he died before his wife screamed.

Gang punks swarmed from the idling car. The driver waited, revving the engine, his hand on the gearshift, as the others smashed the windows of the Buick. One punk grabbed Maria Valencia by the hair and tried to drag her out. Her eight-year-old firstborn son, Miguel, beat at the attacker with his tiny fists.

A punk shoved a short-bladed sword through the boy's body. Another punk fired a .38-caliber revolver wildly into the back seat, hitting six-year-old Thomas.

Maria fought to protect her baby. The punks laughed at her screams, finally dragged her out. They tore the baby from her arms.

As hundreds of cars passed only steps away, the gang raped the young mother in the roadside darkness, then hacked her to death.

The gang escaped in their metal-flaked and lowered Chevrolet. Careering south on the Harbor Freeway at eighty miles an hour, they smoked cigarettes of an acrid-stinking synthetic drug.

When they tired of tossing Maria's baby among themselves like a ball, they threw it out the window.

Lou Stevens listened to his grandson cry. He heard the oak floor creak as his daughter paced the bedroom with the baby in her arms, crooning to quiet his cries.

In the years since his wife died, Stevens had lived alone. Though the neighborhood people knew him as a man unchanging in his daily routine, he welcomed the disruption of his daughter and son-in-law's visit to show him his grandson…

His chairmanship of his corporation did not allow Stevens the time to visit his daughter and son-in-law in the East. Therefore, he had persuaded them to take the money for the air fares and lost wages. Their visit came at an inconvenient time now, but he would not postpone their trip. If the company objected to his limited concentration on the pressing business of microprocessors, let the board vote him into retirement.

In the late night silence, lying alone in the darkness of his bedroom, Stevens listened to his blood pulse in his ears. He felt the rhythm of his heart. Sixty-one years old, he did not imagine himself immortal. After fifty years of work, forty years in electronics, twenty years as a manager in a high-stress industry, he knew he neared the end. He had seen men ten years younger than he was drop on the office floor and die before the paramedics arrived.

But in one lifetime, he had climbed from the gutter to within grabbing distance of the upper class. Self-educated — with the assistance of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the G.I. Bill — he had learned to design circuits. When companies refused to share the profits of his imagination, he formed his own company dedicated to the opportunity to achieve and to receive a fair reward. His patents and the patents of the young engineers staffing his research and development labs now earned more profits than his company's manufacturing division.

Though his daughter and poet son refused his offers of guaranteed positions with his company — he had listened to their refusals with pride — Stevens would not give them the opportunity to refuse their inheritance. He had no fear they would squander the money. In their own ways, they reflected his puritan discipline and creative drive. His son won award after prestigious award for his poetry, while sacrificing the tenure and financial security of a university to devote his genius to full-time writing. His daughter had invested ten years of Spartan existence to win post-graduate honors at her university, then preeminence at a foundation dedicated to the study of emerging modern culture.

Neither of his kids made any money. None of his friends ever opened the books of his son's poetry that Stevens gave away by the hundreds. And he could not even tell his friends what his daughter studied — he never understood her explanations.

Alone in the dark, listening to the crying of his grandson and the singing of his daughter, Stevens realized he had not been so happy in years. He regretted only that his wife had not lived to see their victory.

Lou Stevens thought of his life and wealth as a victory over impossible odds. As if in a vivid and brilliantly colored dream, he remembered going through the trash of Los Angeles neighborhoods to find discarded electrical appliances. He hit the cans first with a stick to chase out the rats, then searched for appliances and wire and bits of metal he could sell as scrap. Many years ago…

Music blasted the street's quiet. Music, ha! Stevens snorted in the dark. How can kids think that electronic shrieking is music?

Stevens laughed at himself. Your designs and components, mister. That kind of music will pay for the boy's schooling twenty years from now.

A car door slammed. Other doors slammed. Raucous laughter became hyena cackles. The sound of those voices made Stevens's body flash cold. He sat up in bed. He often lay awake all night worrying over business and technological problems. He knew the voices of every neighbor on the block.

He did not recognize the voices in the street. Going to the window, he eased the drapery aside an inch.

Four figures in black walked to his home's gate. One pointed to the new Cadillac in the driveway. They laughed. In the street, the passenger-side front door of their lowered car opened.

In the moment that the dome light revealed the interior, he saw two young men in the front seat. One wore bandannas over his hair and face, leaving only his eyes exposed. The driver, a young black man with a mass of ratted hair, waited behind the steering wheel.

The bandanna-masked teenager carried a sawed-off shotgun.

Heart pounding in his chest, Stevens saw the four shadows at the front of his house vault the low fence. They walked through the flowers to his front door.

In his pajamas, Stevens went to his bedroom door. He stopped. He went back to his bed and reached underneath. By touch, he disconnected the electronic alarm and tear-gas booby trap. He took out his new shotgun.

A SPAS-12, the weapon had represented more of an indulgence than a precaution when he bought it. A good slide-action shotgun would have been enough. Instead, he bought the SPAS, a 12-gauge assault weapon with dual automatic-manual action modes. Fitted with an Aimpoint site, the weapon cost almost a thousand dollars total, including gunsmithing. But he could afford it. And what it did to beer cans made him laugh all day.

He gripped the cold plastic and phosphate-black steel. His right index finger confirmed the position of the safety. Then he went to the guest room. "Julie," he hissed. He listened for sounds from the front of the house as he waited for her answer. "Julie!"

"He'll be quiet in a minute, dad. Sorry he woke you up."

"Call the police right now."

"What?"

"Don't talk. Call the police. Tell them..."

Glass shattered.

2

Waves broke in the night. The cool predawn wind flagged the motel's curtains. Listening to the surf and the distant sounds of the Pacific Coast Highway, Carl Lyons held Flor Trujillo.

For a few minutes of peace, Lyons floated in the soft darkness of ecstasy, without thought, without memory, without horror or rage. Conscious only of sensation, he heard his breathing and Flor's breathing and the waves breaking on Malibu Beach in one sound, as if the darkness outside of him and the darkness within breathed in one rhythm.

The sensation flowered and became a mosaic of perceptions: the warmth of Flor's thigh against his face, the throb of her femoral artery, the caress of her hand on his leg. He felt the breeze on his sweat.

Sensations without thought. Sensations defining the form of his body, where his body touched Flor, where his body touched the wadded and tangled sheets of the bed, where the night wind touched him. For minutes, he existed only as a form defined by sensations.

Then he remembered their pleasure. The sweat-slick flesh of Flor's thighs, his fingers clawing into her flesh, her muscles snapping taut like steel cables as she spasmed in ecstasy, her cries and gasps, his breathing locked with hers. The rhythm and tempo had intoxicated them, her arms gripping him, pulling him against her as if urging him to plunge deeper into her, to thrust deep into the center of her self, her hands jerking him against her, and then his climax.

Her tongue touched him again, the spin of her tongue stopping his memories. He groaned and moved in the bed. "Oh… no. Can't."

" Let's make it number five."

"Five?"

"Four so far."

"Impossible…"

"What?"

"This is amazing."

"We're just decharging. It's two months since that time in Washington."

Lyons thought back. Washington. Flor had flown into Dulles and called him at Stony Man. They had an evening and most of the night before his pager buzzed with a call from Stony Man. He flew to Guatemala, she flew to Colombia. He traveled as a soldier, she as a courier. They both fought. He felt his identity returning, the fears and hatreds and horrible, shuddering memories rushing into the pleasure-drained void of his mind, like a flight of bats crowding through the eye sockets of a skull.

"Please don't talk."

"Who wants to talk?" Her legs circled him. She locked her ankles behind him. He smelled the fragrance of her hair. The bed began to squeak and rock. Once again he started to slam into her.

Laughing, she responded to his violence with slow, sensuous writhing of her hips. But after a minute of his body slamming her, she whispered, "Easy. Easy. Slow down. Easy."

He continued slamming her. She told him, "Stop it. Slow down, you're hurting me."

Grabbing her hips in his hands, he continued, not seeking to give or gain but only desperately wanting unconsciousness.

Flor defended herself. Grasping his head in both hands, she pressed her sharp thumbnails against his closed eyes. She put only slight pressure against the eyelids as she warned him, "Stop now!"

Lyons threw himself aside, twisting his face away from the knives of her thumbnails, reflexively straightarming Flor away to a safe distance. His breath came in gasps as he leaned against the headboard.

A siren screamed from the highway, the sound rising and falling, coming closer. The years of service with the LAPD left him with the habit of listening for the identity of the vehicle. Only an ambulance, surely, taking an accident casualty to the hospital?

Or maybe a sheriff's black-and-white racing to the rescue of a fellow officer? Did an officer at this moment, at this precise moment, hold his guts with one hand while he radioed for help? If Lyons had a scanner he would know. Maybe he could help somehow...

"What's wrong? What's going on with you?" Flor said. "One minute you're a lover and the next, you're… you're berserk."

"Nothing. I just got too rough. I'm sorry."

"No, Carl. I don't mean just now. I mean all night. This afternoon. You're here, then you're not. You're someplace else. You see things. Your face goes hard, like you're ready to attack something. Someone."

"Me? Do that?" He forced a laugh.

"Sometimes you are a scary guy."

Lyons laughed at the understatement. His Able Team partners — Rosario Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz — also thought of him as a scary guy. "You are five different kinds of scary, scary dude" to quote both Gadgets and the founder of Able Team, Mack Bolan.

"I am," he finally told her, laughing as if he joked. "I am a very scary guy. I even scare myself."

"You may be, but you're a decent man first. A good man. You're easy to like. I liked you before I even really met you. I ever tell you that?"

"What? You don't know anything about me. Not what I do, not who I am or was..."

"Yes, I do. That time in Bolivia. When the Justice Department wanted me to help create an identity for your team. I read your file. And your partners' files. And I wouldn't have you three anywhere near me until I knew everything I could. Simple little things like information and common sense keep me alive. I read and reread your file. In fact, I knew all about you before you even saw me."

"Is that why you came on to me on the yacht? I mean, that was out of the blue."

"Why? I thought you'd be a good risk for an affair. And it worked out."

Lyons laughed. "I feel like a mail-order bride. Dude by dossier. You must have good recommendations. Why'd they let you in on all that information?"

"Why not? I needed to judge your character. Your commander recognized that."

"What about the rest of it?"

"What?"

"The operations. The missions. What did you think?"

"I didn't get that. I only got your personal files. Nothing about..."

"Oh. Then you don't know."

"I can guess. Don't forget the time in Miami with your Colonel Phoenix and that Cuban Romeo."

"I heard about it," Lyons nodded. "All you did was drive the car..."

"What? They said that? I just drove the car? I had to kill two men in Miami, before we even went to the camp. So I just drove the car? That's like saying the kamikaze just flew the plane."

"I'm joking." Lyons rolled in the bed and held her. "They told me all about it. Very extreme."

"Was it?"

"You tell me. You were there. I only heard the stories."

"I mean, was that mission extreme? Or is that what you do all the time?"

Lyons sat up again. He reached out for one of the beers beside the bed. He twisted off the cap and gulped. Foam ran down his face and into his chest hair.

Flor's hand massaged the cold foam over his chest and shoulder. Her fingers traced the rope-like scar where a 7.62 NATO slug had touched his side, breaking ribs and making him cough blood for weeks. Her fingers found other scars where fire or knives or shrapnel had marked his body.

"You don't get scars like these working in an office."

"I used to be a cop. They'd dispatch us to break up a family fight, and the family would call a truce long enough to beat us half to death."

"This scar on your arm is new." She touched his left arm where the scabs and discoloration had finally disappeared after months of healing. A crescent-moon scar remained from a wound caused, absurd as it seemed, by a rearview mirror thrown by the impact of a machine-gun slug. The mirror had almost broken his arm.

She traced the new-moon welt with a finger. "Where'd you get it?"

"Playing football on the beach. I fell and..."

"Bullshit."

"Really, I fell down on..."

"A cookie cutter, which just happened to be there."

"Nah, an attack-trained clam. Fell on it and woke it up. Snap!"

"Carl, you joke and you laugh. But it isn't funny to see you. You're haunted. It's like you've got different people moving around inside you. What's happened to you? What have they got you doing?"

"You don't have clearance." He gulped down the last of the beer, twisted the cap off another.

"Are the three of you, the two other men and you, and the others I met — are you a hit unit?"

"You don't have clearance."

"Are you an assassin?"

Lyons did not answer.

Flor pressed her question. "I do have clearance. The phone call came through last week. I'm detaching from the Drug Enforcement Agency. I'm staying on the agency payroll but I'll be answering to both the agency and your Stony Man. They call me an Interface Operative now. Drugs and terrorism..."

"Oh, God, no…" Lyons groaned. He left the bed, paced the motel room. "Why'd he do this?"

"Who? Who's he? I got the call from the Justice Department."

"Phoenix."

"The colonel?"

"I'll tell you this, without clearance and without 'highest authority.' When you get your check, buy whatever you want. Listen to me. Don't put any money in the bank. Don't buy life insurance. Buy the best clothes, the best shoes. Buy anything that'll give you a laugh."

"It's dangerous. Is that what you're telling me? So you think it's so safe, what I've done? Pretending to be an international dope gangster? Do you want to protect me? You think I will die?"

"Getting killed ain't it…" Lyons pointed to his right eye. "It's what you see. After that, dying, thinking about dying isn't the same. You recognize the advantages of being dead. No memories. No thinking..."

"Where have they sent you? What have you done?"

"You really got clearance? That the truth?"

"They want me to fly back with you. After your demonstration at the academy."

Lyons stood naked in the darkness. He looked around at the walls and furniture, the infinite number of small hiding places for microphones and minitransmitters. He glanced at Flor's purse and folded clothing.

He had rented the room at random. No one — not Flor, not even he himself — knew they would stay in the Malibu motel. With an afternoon and night to spend together before his demonstration of the Atchisson assault shotgun at the LAPD Academy firing range the next day, he had driven north on the Pacific Coast Highway. He saw the motel sign and stopped. Totally on a whim. Still, he took no chances…

As he put on a sweat shirt and swimming trunks, he motioned for Flor to dress. "How about a walk on the beach?"

"You won't talk in here?"

Lyons shook his head.

On the beach, walking arm in arm on the cold sand, he told her of his work in the past year. He talked until sunrise.

Flor listened to all the horror and inhumanity and suffering.

"What do you think?" Lyons concluded. "Is that what you want to do with your life?"

"Those people in New York, in the Amazon, in Guatemala, those Salvadorans — all of them, they're alive because of you. You and Blancanales and Gadgets, right?"

"Yeah, I think about that a lot. That's what makes it all worth it."

"Do you think it would be any different for me? I've seen what you've seen, but I couldn't do anything about it. Now I can. What greater opportunity could I hope for?"

"The terrorists — there's always more. We kill one, a hundred come. We kill the hundred, the Soviets only open more training camps. There's no end to the killing and suffering."

" And what if we didn't fight?"

"Take a tour of Cambodia. That could be America. And the Soviets would put Pol Pot in charge of American reeducation."

"Then we fight…"

Lyons nodded. He put his arms around Flor and held her, the rise and fall of her chest soft against his muscles. He tasted the sweat-salt in her hair as the offshore wind blew strands of it over his face. He closed his eyes to the graying Pacific, the red-streaked skyline of mountains and beachfront homes. He wished he knew the future. But he did not, could not, and would not want to know when the bullet or knife or blastflash would end him.

When he died, he died. But now, in this moment of life and pleasure on Malibu Beach, he held the woman he loved. He thought of nothing but love.

3

Three hours later, at the firing range of the Los Angeles Police Department's Academy in Elysian Park, Lyons paced the walkways. No one had appeared for his demonstration of the Atchisson selective-fire assault shotgun. The firing range remained deserted at nine-thirty in the morning. No academy cadets, no police officers used the range. At nine o'clock, the scheduled time for the demonstration, only Lyons and Flor stood at the long counter running the length of the facility. Now, after they had waited a half hour, none of the invited officers or security personnel had appeared.

Only the steady pop-pop-pop of a Heckler & Koch PSP 9mm pistol broke the silence. With one hand, then the other, Flor put groups of slugs through the black of a fifty-foot target as fast as she could pull the trigger.

Lyons looked back, saw the young woman rehearsing magazine changes with her right and then her left hand.

Struggling with the awkward position of the magazine release on the butt, Flor attempted to somehow release and eject the empty magazine while holding the next magazine in her off hand. Every time, the hand that held the full mag blocked the drop of the spent magazine. Finally she returned the high-tech German autopistol to its shipping box.

The booming of full-powered cartridges reaffirmed her faith in the downscaled Browning design of the Detonics .45 she always carried. Gripping the small pistol in both hands, she rapid-fired six rounds at the fifty-foot target.

Six .45-caliber slugs scored on the target. As she changed magazines, she called out to Lyons, "Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. The wrong day on the announcement. Perhaps that."

"I typed the announcements myself. I had friends call me long distance to say they'd show up. This is much too weird. At least there should be guys here doing their monthly qualifying. I'm going to call some people."