At the bottom of the airtight plastic package was this legend: REAL MEAT.

Jack laughed. They had to tell you it was “real meat” because, even though it was wrapped in clear plastic, you couldn't tell what the hell it was by looking at it. Yes, siroh, yesham paste and real meat: That was why he had gone to Central America to fight for his country.

He wished Jenny were alive and here with him. Real meat. As opposed to fake, polyester meat. She'd have gotten a kick out of that.

When he walked out of the MiniMart, he paused to study the street again, but again he saw no one suspicious.

He returned to the Cherokee at the dark end of the lot and put up the tailgate. He opened one of his suitcases, withdrew an empty nylon rucksack, the Beretta, a loaded clip, a box of .32 ammunition, and one of the pipetype silencers. As his breath steamed from him in the cold air, he transferred the groceries from the paper bag to the rucksack. He screwed the silencer onto the gun, slammed the loaded clip into the butt. When he had distributed all the loose ammunition among the many pockets of his heavily insulated leather jacket, he closed the tailgate.

Behind the wheel of the Cherokee once more, Jack put the Beretta on the seat beside him and set the rucksack on top of it for concealment. Using the new flashlight, he passed a few minutes studying the map of Elko County. When he switched the flashlight off and put the map away, he was ready to engage the enemy.

For the next five minutes, he drove through Elko, using every trick he knew to reveal a tail, staying on quiet residential streets where traffic was light and where a surveillance team would be as obvious as a festering cold sore, no matter how good they were. Nothing.

He parked at the end of a culdesac and got an antisurveillance broadband receiver from one of the suitcases. This device, the size of two packs of cigarettes, with a short antenna that telescoped out of the top, received all possible radio bands from 30 to 120, including FM from 88 to 108. If a transmitter had been fixed to the Jeep while he was in the market, enabling a tail to follow at a distance, his broadband receiver would pick up the signals; a feedback loop would cause the receiver to emit an earpiercing squeal. He pointed the antenna at the Jeep and slowly circled the vehicle.

The Cherokee had not been bugged.

He put the broadband receiver away and got behind the wheel of the wagon again, where he sat for a minute in thought. He was under neither visual nor electronic surveillance. Did that make sense? When his adversaries put those Tranquility Motel postcards in his safedeposit boxes, they must have known he would come to Nevada at once. Surely they also knew that he was a potentially dangerous man, and surely they would not allow him to plot against them on their own turf unobserved. Yet that seemed to be precisely what they were doing.

Frowning, Jack twisted the key in the ignition. The engine roared.

On the Lear from New York, he had pondered the situation at length and had arrived at several theories (most of them halfbaked) as to the identity and intentions of his adversaries. Now he decided that nothing he dreamed up was half as strange as whatever was actually happening.

No one was watching. That spooked him.

The inexplicable always spooked him.

When you couldn't understand a situation, that usually meant you were missing something important. If you were missing something important, that meant you had a blind side. If you had a blind side, you could get your ass shot off when you were least expecting it.

Alert, cautious, Jack Twist drove north from Elko on State Route 51. After a while, he turned west, following a series of gravel and dirt tracks, sneaking behind the Tranquility Motel instead of making an open approach on I-80. Eventually he was reduced to traveling overland on sometimes dangerous terrain, from an elevation as high as four thousand feet, down across sloping foothills toward the plains. When the clouds parted, revealing a threequarter moon, he switched off the headlights and continued, guided only by the glow of the lunar lamp, and his eyes soon adjusted to the night.

Jack topped a rise and saw the Tranquility Motel, a lonely group of lights in a vast dark emptiness, a mile and a half below and southwest of him, this side of I-80. There were not as many lights as there ought to have been; either the place had little business or it was not open. He did not want to advertise his arrival, so he would proceed on foot.

He left the Beretta in the Jeep and took the Uzi submachine gun. Actually, he did not expect trouble. Not yet. His adversaries, whoever the hell they were, had not teased him into coming all this way merely to kill him. They could have killed him in New York if that was all they wanted. Nevertheless, he was prepared for violence.

In addition to the Uziand a spare magazinehe took the rucksack of groceries, a batterypowered directional microphone, and the Star Tron nightvision device. He pulled on gloves and a toboggan cap.

Jack found the hike invigorating. The night was cold, and when the wind gusted, it stung but not unpleasantly.

Because he'd expected to go to ground immediately upon arrival in Nevada, he had dressed suitably when he left New York. He wore hightopped hiking shoes with hard rubber soles and heavy tread, longjohns and jeans, a sweater, and a leather jacket with a thick quilted lining. The crew of the chartered Lear was surprised by his appearance, but they treated him as if he were in tuxedo and top hat; even an ugly man with one cast eye, dressed like an ordinary laborer, elicited respect when he could afford to lease a private jet rather than fly commercial airlines.

Now Jack walked. Ragged tears in the clouds disrobed the moon, and the few widely scattered patches of snow shone brightly, as if they were shards of bone glimpsed in the darker carcass of the humpbacked hills; the bare earth, rock formations, sagebrush, and plentiful dry grass accepted the caress of moonlight and were limned in a vague milkyblond hue. But when the moon slipped behind the clouds, deep rich darkness flooded forth.

At last he reached a suitable observation point on the southern slope of a hill, only a quarter of a mile behind the Tranquility Motel. He sat down, putting the Uzi and his rucksack aside.

The Star Tron nightvision device took available lightstarlight, moonlight, the natural phosphorescence of snow and of certain plants, meager electric light if anyand am plified it eightyfive thousand times. With the gadget's single lens, Jack could transform all but the very blackest nights into gray daylight or better.

He propped his elbows on his knees, held the Star Tron in both hands, and focused on the Tranquility. The rear of the structure popped into view with sufficient clarity for him to determine that no lookouts were posted in any shadowed niches. None of the motel units had windows along the back wall, so no guards could be watching from those rooms. The center third of the motel had a second floor, probably the owner's apartment, and light shone at most of those windows. However, he could not see into the apartment because the drapes and blinds were drawn.

He put the Star Tron in the rucksack and picked up the batterypowered, handheld, directional microphone, which resembled a futuristic gun. Only a few years ago, “rifle mikes” were effective to a distance of only two hundred yards. But these days, a good poweramplified unit could suck in a conversation up to a quarter of a mile, much farther if conditions were ideal. The device included a pair of compact earphones, which he put on. He aimed the mike at a window shielded by drapes, and at once heard animated voices. However, he got only scraps of their conversation because he was trying to pull their voices out of a closed room and through a quartermile of blustery wind.

With great caution, he grabbed the Uzi and other gear, and moved closer, choosing a second observation point less than a hundred yards from the building. When he aimed the mike at the window again, he picked up every word spoken beyond the glass, in spite of the muffling draperies. He heard six voices, maybe more. They were eating dinner and complimenting the cook (someone named Ned) and his helper (Sandy) on the turkey, the pecan stuffing, and other dishes.

They're not just eating dinner, Jack thought enviously, they're having a damned banquet in there.

He'd eaten a light lunch on the Lear but had taken nothing since. He was still on Eastern Standard Time, so for him it was almost eleven o'clock. He would probably be eavesdropping for hours, piecing together these people's identities, gradually determining if they were his adversaries. He was too hungry to wait that long for his own dinner, such as it was. With a few rocks, he made a brace for the microphone to keep it angled toward the window. He unwrapped the Hamwich and bit into that “pulverized, blended, and remolded” treat. It tasted like sawdust soaked in rancid bacon fat. He spat out the gummy mouthful and settled down to a meager meal of dried beef and doughnuts, which would have been more satisfying if he had not had to listen to those strangers indulging in a modern version of a harvest feast.

Soon, Jack had heard enough of the conversation in the apartment to know these people were not his enemies. Strangely, one way or another, they had been drawn or summoned here, as he'd been. Monitoring them, he began to think their voices were curiously familiar, and he was overcome with the feeling that he belonged among them as a brother among family.

A woman named Ginger and a maneither Don or Dombegan to tell the others about research they'd done earlier in the offices of the Elko Sentinel. Listening to talk of toxic spills, roadblocks, and highly trained DERO troops, Jack felt his appetite fading. DERO! Shit, he'd heard about the DERO companies, though they'd been formed after he'd left the service. They were gungho types who'd happily accept an order to go into a pit against a grizzly bear, armed only with a meat grinder; and they were tough enough to make sausages out of the bear. Forced to choose between a quick, painless suicide and handtohand combat with a DERO, the ordinary man would be welladvised to blow his own brains out and save himself pain. Jack realized he was involved in something far bigger and more dangerous than fratellanza revenge or any of the other things he had hypothesized during his flight from New York.

Although the picture he got from eavesdropping was full of holes, he began to grasp that these people had come together to discover what had happened to them the summer before last, the same weekend Jack had stayed here. They'd made considerable headway in their investigation, and Jack winced as they openly discussed their progress. They were so naive that they thought closed doors and covered windows ensured privacy. He wanted to shout: Hey, for God's sake, shut up already! If I can hear you, they can hear you.

DERO. That bit of news made him even sicker than the Hamwich.

In the motel they continued to chatter, revealing their strat egy to the enemy even as they worked it out, and at last Jack tore off the earphones, frantically grabbed his guns and equipment, and hurried down through the darkness toward the Tranquility Motel.

The apartment had no dining room, just the alcove in the kitchen, but that area was too small to seat nine. In the living room, they moved the furniture against the walls, brought in the kitchen table, and used both extra leaves to extend it, accommodating everyone. To Dom, the impromptu arrangements contributed to the feeling of a family gathering and to the mood of cautious festivity.

Rather than have to repeat themselves, Dom and Ginger had waited until dinner, when the group was gathered, to report on their research at the newspaper in Elko. Now, over the clinking of silverware, they revealed that the Army had blockaded I-80 minutes before the toxic spill that Friday night. Which meant that choppers full of soldiers had been dispatched from distant Shenkfield at least half an hour earlier, and that the Army knew in advance the “accident” was going to happen.

Tearing a crescent roll, Dom said, "If Falkirk and a DERO company flew in and took over security on the quarantine line so soon after the crisis hit . . . well, it means the Army must've had advance warning."

“But then why didn't they stop it from happening?” Jorja Monatella asked as she cut her daughter's serving of turkey into bitesize pieces.

“Apparently, they couldn't stop it,” Dom said.

"Maybe there was a terrorist attack on the truck, and maybe Army Intelligence only got wind of it just before it went down," Ernie said.

“Maybe,” Dom said doubtfully. "But they would've gone public with that kind of story if it happened. So it must've been something else. Something involving topsecret data of such importance that only DERO troops could be trusted to keep quiet about it."

Brendan Cronin had a heartier appetite than anyone at the table, but his temporal appetite did not diminish the spiritual air that had surrounded him. He swallowed some baked corn and said, "This explains why there weren't hundreds of people on those ten miles of interstate when the thing happened, as there should've been at that hour. If the Army sealed it off ahead of the event, they had time to get most traffic out of the danger zone before anything actually happened."

Dom said, "Some didn't get out, saw too much, and were held and brainwashed with the rest of us who were already here at the motel."

For a while everyone joined in the discussion and arrived at all the same theories and unanswerable questions that had occurred to Dom and Ginger at the newspaper offices earlier in the day.

Finally, Dom told them about the important discovery he and Ginger had made when, as an afterthought, they had looked through issues of the Sentinel published during the weeks following the toxic spill. When they had finished poring through editions for the week of the crisis, Ginger had suggested that clues to the secret of what really happened on the closed highway that night might be hidden in other news, in unusual stories that appeared to have nothing to do with the crisis but were, in fact, related to it. They pulled more issues from the files, and by studying every story from a paranoid perspective, they soon found what they hoped for. One place in particular figured in the news in such a way that it seemed linked to the closure of I-80.

“Thunder Hill,” Dom said. "We believe that's where our trouble came from. Shenkfield was just a ruse, a clever misdirection to focus attention away from the real source of the crisis. Thunder Hill."

Faye and Ernie looked up from their plates in surprise, and Faye said, "Thunder Hill's ten or twelve miles northnortheast of here, in the mountains. The Army has an installation up there, toothe Thunder Hill Depository. There're natural limestone caves in those hills, where they store copies of service records and a lot of other important files, so they won't lose all copies if military bases in other parts of the country are wiped out in a disaster ... nuclear war, like that."

Ernie said, "The Depository was here before Faye and me. Twenty years or more. Rumors have it that files and records aren't the only things in storage there. Some believe there's also huge supplies of food, medicines, weapons, ammunition. Which makes sense. In case a big war breaks out, the Army wouldn't want all its weapons and supplies on ordinary military bases because those would be the first nuked. They've surely got fallback caches, and I guess Thunder Hill is one of those."