HOME | DD

Description
The sentry collapsed at the foot of his guard box, without a sound. Amid the rustling of the trees, the humming of the cicadas, and the lapping of the tide just down the hill, he hadn't heard the tomahawk whistling through the air, nor, in the moonless night, had he seen the hand that had thrown it. He had stood for a second, his face frozen in shock, and then slid straight down, pitching neither backward nor forward. His comrade, standing further down the gravel drive, had turned away from the breeze to light a cigarette, and in the instant he had done so a strong arm grabbed him from behind and hauled him into the brush, to be quickly and silently dispatched at knifepoint.
Murphy jogged up to the wall, and crouched in the shadows next to the sentry box, Miranda and Big John trailing him to either side, weapons at the ready. They had circled the building, the blue roofed luxury compound for party officials from the satellite photos, and only counted the two guards outside. They kept to the shadows; despite the minimal guard the windows were ablaze with lights and voices came from within. The dead man sat slumped against the back wall of the box, his rifle in his lap, still hanging from its sling. Murphy wrenched his tomahawk free from the body's skull, and resettled the dead man's cap down over his blankly staring face. The sentry box occupied a spot where the compound's wall was bisected by its driveway, and three of the ROK operators emerged from the bushes where the other sentry had disappeared, to take up their positions on the opposite side of the road. A quick exchange of hand signs confirmed the coast had been cleared, however violently. Rifles leveled to cover their advance, the operatives slipped past the striped vehicle barrier and silently fanned out into the parking lot beyond.

The big black Mercedes limo flew a pair of small flags from the front corners of its hood, which proved to be all the credentials needed at the airbase's north security gate. The guard raised the barrier and came to attention so promptly that Sgt. Lee, the White Tiger NCO, didn't need to tap the brakes at all. Murphy crouched as comfortably as he could in the small space on the floor in front of the passenger seat, sidearm at the ready. Today it was a 9mm Heckler & Koch USP Tactical with a long cylindrical suppressor; underpowered compared to the Mk 23 pistol he would have preferred, but capable of firing his counterfeit DPRK ammunition. In the compartment behind the partition Miranda, Big John, and two more ROK Operators were keeping as inconspicuous as possible; the other White Tiger fire team trailed in a commandeered UAZ-469 jeep, giving their arrival the look of an official convoy, or at least that was the plan.
He had first gotten the idea to use an official car as a Trojan Horse when he had seen them parked in an orderly row in the satellite photo. Colonel Davis had described the idea as "nuts" while Agent Smith thought it amounted to "suicide", but Sgt. Lee and Big John were on board, and Lt. Rodriguez accepted the idea with good humored resignation. Light colored wires hung loose from the steering column where Murphy had torn them out to hotwire the car's ignition. "Nuts" had won again.
"Coming up on the main runway." Lee said quietly, trying to keep his head still. He was wearing one of the dead sentries' hats to give himself the correct silhouette, but up close it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. "Unfriendlies."
"How many?" Murphy asked from the floor.
"One my side, two yours."
"Hear that back there? Passenger side, take the one that's further back."
Murphy reached up for the door handle. He couldn't see out the window from his hiding place, and he had his doubts that a 9mm bullet could be counted upon once it had passed through a car door, especially one so solidly built. He waited as he felt the car slowly roll to a stop.
Sergeant Lee exchanged a few words with someone outside the window in a conversational tone, until the voice outside let out a sudden exclamation, and then was cut short by the phud-phud-phud of Lee's pistol. Murphy pulled the handle and kicked the passenger door open. The nearer KPA soldier was less than ten feet away, struggling to unsling his rifle. Murphy squeezed the trigger three times, the Mozambique drill, just as he had been taught years ago, and the man staggered sideways and fell. Behind him he could hear another silenced weapon firing, and the sound of bullets hitting glass, and then the familiar clacking noise of a Kalashnikov type rifle, and finally one of the team's Mk 17s returning fire. The door swung closed as Lee floored the accelerator, and Murphy reholstered his pistol, releasing the safety on his rifle. Someone was bound to have heard the shots; speed and force were paramount now.
"Coming up… go one!" Lee called out, and Murphy heard the back door bang as Miranda bailed out as the car slowed.
"Go two!" Lee said, in a slightly more conversational tone, and Murphy jumped out of the passenger door as the Mercedes slowed again, but didn't stop. He rolled to his feet next to Big John, and, according to plan, next to the starboard rear of a large cargo plane. Light flooded out the open rear door, briefly catching the flash suppressor on Miranda's M240 as she moved into position on the port side, just as an alert klaxon began to whine in the distance. There was no chance of sneaking away unnoticed now, Murphy reflected, but really, had there ever had been? Big John pulled the pin from a flashbang and tossed it into the light, and before the noise had died away they were storming up the plane's rear cargo ramp.

Lyta banked the Blackhawk through a broad, irregular curve over what she hoped was empty countryside. The false-color hyperspectral image projected on her goggles showed a patchwork of cultivated fields speeding by below, dotted occasionally by a small wood shed, or cut by a narrow access road. The only sources of light and heat out here were the small clusters of buildings housing the farm workers, and she was careful to keep these on the horizon. Some of the larger clusters of buildings had rows of telephone poles marching out to them, their only immediate communication to the authorities in a country where talking on a cell phone was against the law. This late, they should all be asleep, and at a half mile's distance the helo's baffled rotors were all but inaudible.
She leveled off and pointed the Blackhawk's nose due North, flying on in the darkness for a few minutes until the distinctive tower of the concrete works appeared ahead of her, surrounded by conical piles of aggregate. She eased the rudder to starboard, and headed back toward the coast.

Ahead of her, all hell was breaking loose. A pair of parachute flares hung in the sky over the airbase, while a fire burned merrily on the ground below, shortly joined by a second as the radome next to the control tower abruptly went up in a bright yellow flash. A convoy of military trucks was rushing toward the action from the city, and, altering her course to run parallel to the road, Lyta flipped the switch to eject one of her two battle simulator decoys. The specialized pyrotechnic canister burst to life as it hit the ground, erupting with all the flashes and fury of a full scale gun battle; the noise should be enough to tie down the convoy, and with luck draw reinforcements away from the landing zone. She came up on the runway and began throttling back.
Glowing bright in the infrared sight of her goggles, a handful of figures were jogging across the runway under the cover of a large cargo plane, two of them manhandling what appeared to be a giant Tylenol between them. They were trading fire with a larger, slower moving group, a platoon of infantry spreading out to surround the operators, moving with the deliberate patience of a hunter who knows his prey has no retreat. Or perhaps the caution of one who knows his prey is dangerous; as the small group made the ditch at the edge of the runway they stopped to engage the advancing soldiers more deliberately, accurately picking off those who had advanced the closest. Lyta circled the advancing platoon, released her second decoy, and then thundered straight over the heads of the startled KPA troopers back toward the LZ.
To save weight and maximize fuel the Blackhawk had neither a copilot nor a crewman to man the doors, and the raiders had consequently been obliged to leave them open when they had disembarked. They now scrambled aboard as soon as the helicopter's wheels touched the marshy grass, heaving in the giant Tylenol into place and strapping it down, a maneuver they had practiced repeatedly at Osan, but one that became confused and chaotic under fire.
Shots pinged off the helo's hull like angry hail and the deep, familiar thudding of the M240 replied in kind. Through the cockpit's starboard window Lyta could see Miranda standing in a false, night-vision twilight, firing her machinegun from the shoulder, like an assault rifle. Bullets tore up the earth at her feet in great muddy sprays, and one appeared to tear a chunk of Kevlar out of her shoulder pad, but she continued to fire short, aimed bursts until, apparently satisfied, she lowered her weapon and sprinted back to the helicopter. Three more shots rang out singly from behind her and then Lyta heard the doors sliding shut, accompanied by Murphy's voice in her headset.
"Package is secure."
The Blackhawk climbed and sped away, over the burning wreck of the ZSU-23 and out to sea, to hide once again in the darkness before turning south toward safety.

On the other side of the world, Miyuki awoke to the familiar sensation of someone prodding her in the shoulder. She rolled on to her side, and winced as she was suddenly and sharply reminded of the bruise on her ribs. Isis, her Siamese cat, was sitting on the bed next to her, blue eyes alert, her forepaw poised in the air to give Miyuki another prod if she tried to go back to sleep. Isis would escalate slowly, first prodding Miyuki in the shoulder, then sitting on her chest, or the small of her back, then knocking things over to make noise. Like most Siamese she remained largely aloof of people, but she demanded attention when she hadn't been fed. Sometimes she would manage to pull the covers off onto the floor, a truly remarkable feat for an average cat pitting herself against a queen sized bed. It would be a vain effort on this occasion; Miyuki had already cast most of them off sometime the night before.
Miyuki sat up and slid her legs over the side of the bed. The girl in the mirror looked tired and disheveled, her hair a wild mess, made coarse and stiff by immersion in seawater. She let the sheet fall into her lap, exposing her bare chest. The bruise under her left breast had turned an ugly purple; she would have to wear a shirt that would cover it to the gym today. A band-aid on her right shoulder covered the only other damage of the night. High on adrenalin she hadn't given it a thought, but with all the bullets and broken glass flying around, she had gotten off easy.
It really hadn't felt that way.

Minh and Jeff had decided the PG&E truck had been compromised during the chase. Even if the police hadn't gotten a good look at it, it had taken a fair amount of cosmetic damage, including a few bullet holes. They rolled up to a garage somewhere around Potrero Hill where Minh dropped them off; he would hide the truck where no one would find it, he had said, which sounded suspiciously to Miyuki like he was going to park it somewhere and set it on fire.
The remaining three ninja gathered briefly among the cars and tools, in the light of a single bare bulb. Jeff would take the candle back to the temple, but he promised Miyuki no one would try to discover its secrets without her.
"It's just for safe keeping, Snowball. With all the trouble this thing's caused, it needs to be where it's as secure as we can make it."

The sheet slid off of Miyuki's lap, leaving her reflection in the mirror perched naked on the edge of her mattress. Isis, mechanically clawing the sheet toward the foot of the bed, paused and looked up with her big, blue alien eyes, meowing hopefully. Miyuki stood up with some effort, and, scooping up her cat from underneath, made her way to the kitchen. On her way, she passed the crumpled UPS failed delivery notice, lying on her coffee table.

Ten minutes later she was standing under the pulsing jet of her shower, when the doorbell rang. Whoever it was, she wished they would go away. The bell rang again, slightly more drawn out, as if the button had been pushed more forcefully. Lyta had a key. Clarissa would call first. Her fellow ninja would let themselves in. No one who mattered rang the bell.
Her mind flashed back to the delivery slip; a second failed delivery meant a half hour's drive to the holding facility in San Bruno. She didn't have anything handy to put on, and hadn't even rinsed the shampoo all the way out of her hair. That was a half hour's drive each way. More, in rush hour traffic, which she'd probably be facing by the time she was free to do it.

"Package for Mickey Shimada."
"Miyuki. U's not silent, guy." The mangling of Miyuki's name never failed to upset her internal harmony. Having an overly cheerful deliveryman mangle her name while she stood shivering in the doorway of her apartment, naked except for a towel while her wet hair dripped all over the place, did nothing to improve her mood.
"No problem, Miss, just sign here if you would, please."
There followed a clumsy exchange of the electronic clipboard and the package itself; Miyuki could feel her towel begin to shift and clamped it in her armpits to prevent it from falling, making all her arm movements unnaturally stilted. It took three tries to scan the barcode, during which time she became acutely aware that the towel she had picked was the smaller one on the rack and was barely long enough. She gave the bottom edge a furtive pull, just to be certain it actually came down far enough to cover her privates, and the top gave an inch, dropping perilously low around her breasts.
"All right. Y'have a nice day now."
"Yeah, sure, you too." She closed the door, and tossed the package onto her coffee table, returning fifteen minutes later, fully showered, dried, and dressed for work in a tank top emblazoned with the gym's logo and hip hugging yoga pants.
The package was a small rectangle of well-worn brown paper tied with twine, and plastered with several layers of shipping labels. Her name and address were printed in ballpoint pen in careful, practiced letters, the writer having had some trouble with the spelling of "San Francisco". The return address, or what she took to be the return address, was written in a few lines of elegant Devanagari, partially obscured by the approval stamp of the Central Board of Excise and Customs of the Republic of India.
Miyuki produced her balisong from one of its customary hiding places in her waistband, and flipped open the blade with an elaborate and unnecessary flourish. A brief probing of the package revealed no wires or white powders or anything remotely suspicious, and a single, quick slash severed the twine and opened a long, straight split in the paper.
She turned the package on end, and a book slid out, landing with a thump on her coffee table. It was a great example of its kind, an old, thick volume, bound in leather so worn through the years it was impossible to tell what color it was meant to be. Miyuki flipped open the cover to the title page, a masterpiece of Victorian copperplate which proclaimed the book to be the Travels in India, China, Avghanistaun, Nepaul, and Thibet by Colonel Sir Henry Bowman Forsythe, KBE, etc., late of Her Majesty's Bengal Lancers. The man himself appeared in an engraving on the frontispiece, majestic in his ornate uniform and massive mustache. It seemed like an interesting enough book, and possibly one she would buy, although she had absolutely no memory of doing so.

Miyuki's drive from her apartment to the Japantown Center Garage took only 12 minutes, but it was an international journey very like Bowman Forsythe's in microcosm. After the large sign proclaiming the adjacent George Washington High School football field to be the home of the Eagles, the gold domes of the great Russian cathedral came in to view, sparkling in the morning sun. She drove past signs and awnings in Cyrillic, some surmounted by two-headed Romanov eagles, signs in Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, and Korean, past the Shaolin temple, incongruously neighboring a Wells Fargo, past the cluster of Irish pubs inappropriately interspersed with car dealerships. Finally the familiar shape of the Peace Pagoda signaled the journey's end.
Miyuki left her borrowed Acura in a space near the omnipresent Sakamoto & Sons, Florist van. The Temple precinct appeared largely deserted, as it should on a weekday morning. The only movement came from an elderly man in a grey monk's robe, artfully raking concentric swirls in the sand of the karesansui, a small garden of rocks and sand that mimicked a traditional Japanese landscape of islands in the sea. He wasn't alone; Miyuki could feel the sohei watching, just out of view.
"Good morning, sister."
"Good morning, elder brother. Is the Abbot General here?"
"Yes, they are waiting in the Butsuden."
Miyuki nodded in thanks and walked on to the Temple's main hall, the shuffling sound of the rake fading behind her.

Miyuki knelt before the great golden statue of the Amida Buddha, the two halves of the red wax candle lying on the floor immediately before her. Held up to the light, the candle had immediately revealed its secret; the wax had been poured around a stainless steel capsule, which in turn disgorged a USB flash drive. Miyuki gazed up at the calm, benevolent face of the Buddha two stories above her, while Jeff tried the drive in a laptop, one of the spares that could be sacrificed to an invasive virus, if need be.
"Seems fine." Jeff said, finally. "No traps, no security, Just Excel files and pdfs."
Miyuki didn't really have any expectations, but she felt a twinge of disappointment. Spreadsheets were the most boring things on any computer.
"Great, we've captured Chow's accounting." Miyuki returned Jeff's sideways look. "Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that could have put him in jail, back when he was still breathing."
They sat in silence for awhile, while the Abbot General clicked the beads of his nenju, one by one.
"Younger sister," he said, at length, "bookkeeping, as I'm sure you know is an ongoing process. As security conscious as Chow was, don't you think he'd store his records somewhere he could get at them?"
"He made a lot of decisions I don't really agree with."
"He may not have had much moral fiber, but he was practical when he needed to be. Younger brother, is there anything incriminating in any of those files?"
"Not that I can tell, so-daisho. It looks like shipping info, but the spreadsheets are all code numbers, and the pdfs are scans of manifests, so everything appears under a legit heading." Jeff looked up from his screen. "You couldn't blackmail anyone with this, not by itself."
The three fell back into silence. Incense smoke from a brazier near the statue curled up toward the rafters. A quiet, distant rumble came and went, as an airliner passed overhead.
"Could be a receipt for someone he bought from. Or sold to." Miyuki shrugged. "I dunno, I got nothing. I'm goin' to work."
"You gonna see Alli at the gym today?"
"She's my last appointment, why?"
"Ships are her thing." Jeff handed Miyuki a fresh duplicate of the flash drive. "This is gonna take some digging, and she'll know where to dig."

Walking back to the garage, Miyuki met Minh coming the other way, wiping a socket wrench on an oily rag.
"Hey, where's my car, foo'?" She punched him playfully, but smartly in the shoulder.
"Hey, quit it, girl. It's been done." He led her down a branching tunnel and through a heavy metal door. "We finished last night while you were partying in Chinatown."
On the other side of the door was a garage packed with tools, vehicles, and machine parts, many of which Miyuki didn't recognize. Patrol cars from several local departments stood in a row with trucks from the water and public works departments, Caltrans, and, Miyuki noticed, PG&E. A variety of nondescript sedans mingled with a squadron of specially modified Suzuki street racing bikes, and, in the last space at the end, a fluorescent green Nissan 370Z, heavily customized with carbon fiber body panels, angular ground effects, and a sizeable rear wing. The modified suspension and competition rims helped contribute to the car's aggressive stance; the front clip resembled nothing so much as an angry snake, a motif continued in the Chinese dragons incorporated into the trim decals on both doors. Miyuki let out a girlish squeal and bounded over to the car, running her hand lovingly down the driver's side quarter panel.
"Aw baby, did you miss me?"
"Umm… right. Listen, Elder Sister, before you take her out I gotta tell you about the new setup for the NOS bottles…"
"Yeah, whatever, gimme the keys."
"…bright blue fireball…"
"'Course I can, gimme the keys."
"…mechanical failure all down the drivetrain…"
"Love to, gimme the keys."
Minh shrugged and held out a ring of car keys. The stiffest tree is the most easily cracked, the bamboo survives by bending in the wind.

The old man stood his rake on its handle and admired the karesansui laid out before him. The gravel formed a perfect arrangement of concentric circles and organic curves around the larger rocks and the small, neatly trimmed bonsai, as indeed it had before he had started. It was not the end result that was important.
Outside, a highly tuned engine roared, and tires squealed as a car turned out of a driveway far too quickly.

Clarissa looked from the screen of her laptop to the book lying open on her desk, and then back to the screen again. A line of hieroglyphs, ibises, snakes, elongated hands, ran down the screen, inked millennia ago on a papyrus which, brown and fragile with age, had been carefully scanned into the University's digital archive earlier that month. The same line ran down an illustration in the book, blandly labeled "Figure 36B". A careful scrutiny followed, until she could say with certainty that "Figure 36B" and BANCROFTSCAN2012_9_345498.TIFF were one and the same. She gave her chair a celebratory spin, and then rolled over to the University PC that anchored the far end of her desk. Now came the worst part of solving her little mystery, alerting the database through the clunky and outdated interface, which soldiered on through the great virtue of familiarity.
"Ahem. Miss Harlowe?"
"Professor Balducci?"
"Ah there you are my dear. No, don't get up." An avuncular, bespectacled man in a tweed suit made his way carefully between an upright Egyptian sarcophagus and a precarious stack of cardboard boxes. "This just arrived for you at the reception desk."
Balducci laid a slim book on Clarissa's desk, a new book with a plain blue University Press cover. She flipped past the ex libris plate of the divinity school library to the title page; it was a reprint and transcription of the 1627 Relacao of Fr. Estevao Cacella to Fr. Alberto Laercio, his superior within the Jesuit order.
"That was… surprisingly quick."
"I'm afraid that other book you were asking about is still out, the Library wouldn't recall it for me."
"Oh." Clarissa looked up from the Relacao. The Library handed out favors based on an academic hierarchy, and despite her position as custodian of a small corner of the archaeology department she was still an undergraduate, and wasn't surprised when the recall of a book on her behalf was refused. Professor Balducci, however, was tenured, and had been a university fixture for decades. "Did they tell you who has it?"
"Ah, yes, well. It's Levine, that dog. I imagine he keeps a fair portion of the library in a cabinet in his office simply so the rest of us may not read it."
"Do you think Professor Levine would let me borrow it for an afternoon? It's just for reference purposes." Clarissa leaned forward, and pouted slightly. It was the same expression that, subconsciously, made its way to her face whenever she was about to ask someone for something.
"That he might, but he hasn't been in his office for days. He's probably come down with a case of Napa Valley Cabernet again." Balducci stopped himself. He was an older man, and his mind tended to wander. "You might email him and ask. Will we see you this weekend, at the Vitus Bering Dinner?"
"Oh yes, I wouldn't miss it for anything."

As the Campanile rang five o'clock, Clarissa decided that Balducci had been suggesting that she break into Levine's office. At least that was the excuse she gave herself when she decided she was going to break into Levine's office. She certainly preferred the covert approach to actually talking to the man; he was standoffish and condescending toward her, whether because of her age or her gender she couldn't tell. But worst of all, he a crushing bore, and in love with the sound of his own voice.
She had spent the afternoon entertaining herself with fantastic plans to break into Levine's office, imagining herself scaling the outer wall or rappelling from the roof to gain access to the window, even though she had a utility key that opened the door; she imagined disguising herself as a janitor to enter the office unobtrusively, even though everyone in the building knew who she was, and the disguise she envisioned, a French maid's outfit, would only serve to make her more obvious. She even imagined smuggling herself in an Egyptian sarcophagus delivered to Levine's office, even though his specialty was Assyriology. The more she thought about it, the more it struck Clarissa as odd that an Assyriologist would even want a book on East Asia in the first place.
In the end she waited until most of the professors had left for the day, walked down an empty hallway and, anticlimactically, let herself into Levine's office with the utility key. When she told Miyuki about this later she'd have to say she rappelled through the window. Possibly while wearing a French maid's uniform. No, that was going too far, it had to be one or the other.
The sun hadn't quite fully set yet, but Levine's office was on the East side of the building, and once she had shut the door behind her Clarissa found it dark enough that she had to use her mini maglite to read the bindings of the books that lined the walls. The overhead light would show under the door and out the window, she reasoned, and didn't feel nearly conspiratorial enough. Most of the books dealt with the ancient Middle East, Sumer, Assyria, Babylon. They were exactly what a professor of Assyriology would have, and not what she was looking for. The beam of her flashlight swept past a book lying on Levine's desk and then suddenly darted back. The book was familiar, and well it should be, after all, she had been reading it for the past week; it was the memoirs of Prince Mikhail Vasilievich Obolensky.
Behind her, Clarissa heard footsteps in the hall. She froze, listening until she was certain they were coming nearer. She switched off her light as the footsteps stopped outside the door. A hand tested the knob, and after a pause the door gave a soft rattle; Clarissa had had the presence of mind to lock it behind her, and now someone was picking it open. For lack of a better option she wedged herself under Levine's desk, and held her breath as the door swung open, briefly illuminating the room in the yellow glow of the corridor lights.
The intruder started at the bookcase and worked quickly, and quietly. It sounded like he was sliding the books in and out, searching less for a particular book than, perhaps, something hidden among the books. The footsteps drew nearer, and Clarissa heard Obolensky's book lifted, and then dropped on the desk above her. She held her breath, and, after pushing herself as far under the desk as possible, tried to remain very still.
The footsteps moved around to the back of Levine's desk, and suddenly moved into Clarissa's line of sight. The intruder was a man, of about average size, she guessed. He wore black leather shoes, with rubber soles, and dark colored pants; even if he hadn't come specifically to break in, he was dressed to do so. The drawers around Clarissa rolled open and closed in rapid succession; Levine's desk was large and old, and from her hiding place the noise was tremendous. As the wide, flat drawer right above her head slammed shut, it dislodged a thin composition book which had apparently been taped to the underside of the desk. Instinctively, her hand shot out, catching it silently before it smacked into the floor. Had he seen it fall?
"¿Profesor Levine?" the janitor's familiar voice called through the door, "¿Profesor, es usted?"
The intruder was at the window even before they heard the keys jingling in the door, and casually climbed through it like he was walking out a door. As soon as the man vanished from sight, Clarissa was after him, sidling along a ledge away from the window as the janitor switched on the lights in Levine's office. It had only been a few seconds, but the intruder was already down on the ground, strolling away with his hands in his pockets, as if nothing unusual had happened.
Clarissa had no idea how he had managed it. Her best option, she decided, was a large oak tree that cast a branch toward the wall of the ARF building; it was probably only a few feet away, but with a two story drop below it looked to be miles distant. Grasping the notebook with her teeth, she launched herself from the ledge, grabbing for the branch with both hands. She caught, hung for a second, and then swung her legs up, and shimmied toward the trunk.
The descent cost her a few scratches and destroyed her stockings, but she made it to the ground without losing sight of the intruder as he walked across the plaza and passed the Kroeber Fountain. With the notebook under her arm, Clarissa looked like just another student, albeit one who had just been in a fight with a tree. She chose a different path around the fountain, keeping a discreet distance; if the man had noticed her following him, he didn't react in any way.
As the man approached Bancroft Street at the edge of campus, a big black Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb, and he hopped in the passenger door. It seemed to Clarissa that the car had barely slowed down, it was back mingling with traffic in seconds. As it pulled away, she got a good look at its rear license plate, one of the sky blue plates issued by the State Department to foreign embassies and consulates.
Clarissa repeated the license number twice to herself, and then, not trusting that she would remember it, fumbled in her pocket for a pen. She was at the point of writing the number on her hand when she remembered the notebook. Flipping it open, she scribbled the number quickly in one of the margins before it had a chance to jumble in her mind and then flee completely. Then the streetlight above her flickered to life, and she felt a chill run through her, despite the balmy Indian summer evening. Dr. Levine's notes very closely paralleled her own; the book that he had felt the need to try to hide detailed the beginnings of his own search for the Oracle Sword.

Description
The sentry collapsed at the foot of his guard box, without a sound. Amid the rustling of the trees, the humming of the cicadas, and the lapping of the tide just down the hill, he hadn't heard the tomahawk whistling through the air, nor, in the moonless night, had he seen the hand that had thrown it. He had stood for a second, his face frozen in shock, and then slid straight down, pitching neither backward nor forward. His comrade, standing further down the gravel drive, had turned away from the breeze to light a cigarette, and in the instant he had done so a strong arm grabbed him from behind and hauled him into the brush, to be quickly and silently dispatched at knifepoint.
Murphy jogged up to the wall, and crouched in the shadows next to the sentry box, Miranda and Big John trailing him to either side, weapons at the ready. They had circled the building, the blue roofed luxury compound for party officials from the satellite photos, and only counted the two guards outside. They kept to the shadows; despite the minimal guard the windows were ablaze with lights and voices came from within. The dead man sat slumped against the back wall of the box, his rifle in his lap, still hanging from its sling. Murphy wrenched his tomahawk free from the body's skull, and resettled the dead man's cap down over his blankly staring face. The sentry box occupied a spot where the compound's wall was bisected by its driveway, and three of the ROK operators emerged from the bushes where the other sentry had disappeared, to take up their positions on the opposite side of the road. A quick exchange of hand signs confirmed the coast had been cleared, however violently. Rifles leveled to cover their advance, the operatives slipped past the striped vehicle barrier and silently fanned out into the parking lot beyond.

The big black Mercedes limo flew a pair of small flags from the front corners of its hood, which proved to be all the credentials needed at the airbase's north security gate. The guard raised the barrier and came to attention so promptly that Sgt. Lee, the White Tiger NCO, didn't need to tap the brakes at all. Murphy crouched as comfortably as he could in the small space on the floor in front of the passenger seat, sidearm at the ready. Today it was a 9mm Heckler & Koch USP Tactical with a long cylindrical suppressor; underpowered compared to the Mk 23 pistol he would have preferred, but capable of firing his counterfeit DPRK ammunition. In the compartment behind the partition Miranda, Big John, and two more ROK Operators were keeping as inconspicuous as possible; the other White Tiger fire team trailed in a commandeered UAZ-469 jeep, giving their arrival the look of an official convoy, or at least that was the plan.
He had first gotten the idea to use an official car as a Trojan Horse when he had seen them parked in an orderly row in the satellite photo. Colonel Davis had described the idea as "nuts" while Agent Smith thought it amounted to "suicide", but Sgt. Lee and Big John were on board, and Lt. Rodriguez accepted the idea with good humored resignation. Light colored wires hung loose from the steering column where Murphy had torn them out to hotwire the car's ignition. "Nuts" had won again.
"Coming up on the main runway." Lee said quietly, trying to keep his head still. He was wearing one of the dead sentries' hats to give himself the correct silhouette, but up close it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. "Unfriendlies."
"How many?" Murphy asked from the floor.
"One my side, two yours."
"Hear that back there? Passenger side, take the one that's further back."
Murphy reached up for the door handle. He couldn't see out the window from his hiding place, and he had his doubts that a 9mm bullet could be counted upon once it had passed through a car door, especially one so solidly built. He waited as he felt the car slowly roll to a stop.
Sergeant Lee exchanged a few words with someone outside the window in a conversational tone, until the voice outside let out a sudden exclamation, and then was cut short by the phud-phud-phud of Lee's pistol. Murphy pulled the handle and kicked the passenger door open. The nearer KPA soldier was less than ten feet away, struggling to unsling his rifle. Murphy squeezed the trigger three times, the Mozambique drill, just as he had been taught years ago, and the man staggered sideways and fell. Behind him he could hear another silenced weapon firing, and the sound of bullets hitting glass, and then the familiar clacking noise of a Kalashnikov type rifle, and finally one of the team's Mk 17s returning fire. The door swung closed as Lee floored the accelerator, and Murphy reholstered his pistol, releasing the safety on his rifle. Someone was bound to have heard the shots; speed and force were paramount now.
"Coming up… go one!" Lee called out, and Murphy heard the back door bang as Miranda bailed out as the car slowed.
"Go two!" Lee said, in a slightly more conversational tone, and Murphy jumped out of the passenger door as the Mercedes slowed again, but didn't stop. He rolled to his feet next to Big John, and, according to plan, next to the starboard rear of a large cargo plane. Light flooded out the open rear door, briefly catching the flash suppressor on Miranda's M240 as she moved into position on the port side, just as an alert klaxon began to whine in the distance. There was no chance of sneaking away unnoticed now, Murphy reflected, but really, had there ever had been? Big John pulled the pin from a flashbang and tossed it into the light, and before the noise had died away they were storming up the plane's rear cargo ramp.

Lyta banked the Blackhawk through a broad, irregular curve over what she hoped was empty countryside. The false-color hyperspectral image projected on her goggles showed a patchwork of cultivated fields speeding by below, dotted occasionally by a small wood shed, or cut by a narrow access road. The only sources of light and heat out here were the small clusters of buildings housing the farm workers, and she was careful to keep these on the horizon. Some of the larger clusters of buildings had rows of telephone poles marching out to them, their only immediate communication to the authorities in a country where talking on a cell phone was against the law. This late, they should all be asleep, and at a half mile's distance the helo's baffled rotors were all but inaudible.
She leveled off and pointed the Blackhawk's nose due North, flying on in the darkness for a few minutes until the distinctive tower of the concrete works appeared ahead of her, surrounded by conical piles of aggregate. She eased the rudder to starboard, and headed back toward the coast.

Ahead of her, all hell was breaking loose. A pair of parachute flares hung in the sky over the airbase, while a fire burned merrily on the ground below, shortly joined by a second as the radome next to the control tower abruptly went up in a bright yellow flash. A convoy of military trucks was rushing toward the action from the city, and, altering her course to run parallel to the road, Lyta flipped the switch to eject one of her two battle simulator decoys. The specialized pyrotechnic canister burst to life as it hit the ground, erupting with all the flashes and fury of a full scale gun battle; the noise should be enough to tie down the convoy, and with luck draw reinforcements away from the landing zone. She came up on the runway and began throttling back.
Glowing bright in the infrared sight of her goggles, a handful of figures were jogging across the runway under the cover of a large cargo plane, two of them manhandling what appeared to be a giant Tylenol between them. They were trading fire with a larger, slower moving group, a platoon of infantry spreading out to surround the operators, moving with the deliberate patience of a hunter who knows his prey has no retreat. Or perhaps the caution of one who knows his prey is dangerous; as the small group made the ditch at the edge of the runway they stopped to engage the advancing soldiers more deliberately, accurately picking off those who had advanced the closest. Lyta circled the advancing platoon, released her second decoy, and then thundered straight over the heads of the startled KPA troopers back toward the LZ.
To save weight and maximize fuel the Blackhawk had neither a copilot nor a crewman to man the doors, and the raiders had consequently been obliged to leave them open when they had disembarked. They now scrambled aboard as soon as the helicopter's wheels touched the marshy grass, heaving in the giant Tylenol into place and strapping it down, a maneuver they had practiced repeatedly at Osan, but one that became confused and chaotic under fire.
Shots pinged off the helo's hull like angry hail and the deep, familiar thudding of the M240 replied in kind. Through the cockpit's starboard window Lyta could see Miranda standing in a false, night-vision twilight, firing her machinegun from the shoulder, like an assault rifle. Bullets tore up the earth at her feet in great muddy sprays, and one appeared to tear a chunk of Kevlar out of her shoulder pad, but she continued to fire short, aimed bursts until, apparently satisfied, she lowered her weapon and sprinted back to the helicopter. Three more shots rang out singly from behind her and then Lyta heard the doors sliding shut, accompanied by Murphy's voice in her headset.
"Package is secure."
The Blackhawk climbed and sped away, over the burning wreck of the ZSU-23 and out to sea, to hide once again in the darkness before turning south toward safety.

On the other side of the world, Miyuki awoke to the familiar sensation of someone prodding her in the shoulder. She rolled on to her side, and winced as she was suddenly and sharply reminded of the bruise on her ribs. Isis, her Siamese cat, was sitting on the bed next to her, blue eyes alert, her forepaw poised in the air to give Miyuki another prod if she tried to go back to sleep. Isis would escalate slowly, first prodding Miyuki in the shoulder, then sitting on her chest, or the small of her back, then knocking things over to make noise. Like most Siamese she remained largely aloof of people, but she demanded attention when she hadn't been fed. Sometimes she would manage to pull the covers off onto the floor, a truly remarkable feat for an average cat pitting herself against a queen sized bed. It would be a vain effort on this occasion; Miyuki had already cast most of them off sometime the night before.
Miyuki sat up and slid her legs over the side of the bed. The girl in the mirror looked tired and disheveled, her hair a wild mess, made coarse and stiff by immersion in seawater. She let the sheet fall into her lap, exposing her bare chest. The bruise under her left breast had turned an ugly purple; she would have to wear a shirt that would cover it to the gym today. A band-aid on her right shoulder covered the only other damage of the night. High on adrenalin she hadn't given it a thought, but with all the bullets and broken glass flying around, she had gotten off easy.
It really hadn't felt that way.

Minh and Jeff had decided the PG&E truck had been compromised during the chase. Even if the police hadn't gotten a good look at it, it had taken a fair amount of cosmetic damage, including a few bullet holes. They rolled up to a garage somewhere around Potrero Hill where Minh dropped them off; he would hide the truck where no one would find it, he had said, which sounded suspiciously to Miyuki like he was going to park it somewhere and set it on fire.
The remaining three ninja gathered briefly among the cars and tools, in the light of a single bare bulb. Jeff would take the candle back to the temple, but he promised Miyuki no one would try to discover its secrets without her.
"It's just for safe keeping, Snowball. With all the trouble this thing's caused, it needs to be where it's as secure as we can make it."

The sheet slid off of Miyuki's lap, leaving her reflection in the mirror perched naked on the edge of her mattress. Isis, mechanically clawing the sheet toward the foot of the bed, paused and looked up with her big, blue alien eyes, meowing hopefully. Miyuki stood up with some effort, and, scooping up her cat from underneath, made her way to the kitchen. On her way, she passed the crumpled UPS failed delivery notice, lying on her coffee table.

Ten minutes later she was standing under the pulsing jet of her shower, when the doorbell rang. Whoever it was, she wished they would go away. The bell rang again, slightly more drawn out, as if the button had been pushed more forcefully. Lyta had a key. Clarissa would call first. Her fellow ninja would let themselves in. No one who mattered rang the bell.
Her mind flashed back to the delivery slip; a second failed delivery meant a half hour's drive to the holding facility in San Bruno. She didn't have anything handy to put on, and hadn't even rinsed the shampoo all the way out of her hair. That was a half hour's drive each way. More, in rush hour traffic, which she'd probably be facing by the time she was free to do it.

"Package for Mickey Shimada."
"Miyuki. U's not silent, guy." The mangling of Miyuki's name never failed to upset her internal harmony. Having an overly cheerful deliveryman mangle her name while she stood shivering in the doorway of her apartment, naked except for a towel while her wet hair dripped all over the place, did nothing to improve her mood.
"No problem, Miss, just sign here if you would, please."
There followed a clumsy exchange of the electronic clipboard and the package itself; Miyuki could feel her towel begin to shift and clamped it in her armpits to prevent it from falling, making all her arm movements unnaturally stilted. It took three tries to scan the barcode, during which time she became acutely aware that the towel she had picked was the smaller one on the rack and was barely long enough. She gave the bottom edge a furtive pull, just to be certain it actually came down far enough to cover her privates, and the top gave an inch, dropping perilously low around her breasts.
"All right. Y'have a nice day now."
"Yeah, sure, you too." She closed the door, and tossed the package onto her coffee table, returning fifteen minutes later, fully showered, dried, and dressed for work in a tank top emblazoned with the gym's logo and hip hugging yoga pants.
The package was a small rectangle of well-worn brown paper tied with twine, and plastered with several layers of shipping labels. Her name and address were printed in ballpoint pen in careful, practiced letters, the writer having had some trouble with the spelling of "San Francisco". The return address, or what she took to be the return address, was written in a few lines of elegant Devanagari, partially obscured by the approval stamp of the Central Board of Excise and Customs of the Republic of India.
Miyuki produced her balisong from one of its customary hiding places in her waistband, and flipped open the blade with an elaborate and unnecessary flourish. A brief probing of the package revealed no wires or white powders or anything remotely suspicious, and a single, quick slash severed the twine and opened a long, straight split in the paper.
She turned the package on end, and a book slid out, landing with a thump on her coffee table. It was a great example of its kind, an old, thick volume, bound in leather so worn through the years it was impossible to tell what color it was meant to be. Miyuki flipped open the cover to the title page, a masterpiece of Victorian copperplate which proclaimed the book to be the Travels in India, China, Avghanistaun, Nepaul, and Thibet by Colonel Sir Henry Bowman Forsythe, KBE, etc., late of Her Majesty's Bengal Lancers. The man himself appeared in an engraving on the frontispiece, majestic in his ornate uniform and massive mustache. It seemed like an interesting enough book, and possibly one she would buy, although she had absolutely no memory of doing so.

Miyuki's drive from her apartment to the Japantown Center Garage took only 12 minutes, but it was an international journey very like Bowman Forsythe's in microcosm. After the large sign proclaiming the adjacent George Washington High School football field to be the home of the Eagles, the gold domes of the great Russian cathedral came in to view, sparkling in the morning sun. She drove past signs and awnings in Cyrillic, some surmounted by two-headed Romanov eagles, signs in Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, and Korean, past the Shaolin temple, incongruously neighboring a Wells Fargo, past the cluster of Irish pubs inappropriately interspersed with car dealerships. Finally the familiar shape of the Peace Pagoda signaled the journey's end.
Miyuki left her borrowed Acura in a space near the omnipresent Sakamoto & Sons, Florist van. The Temple precinct appeared largely deserted, as it should on a weekday morning. The only movement came from an elderly man in a grey monk's robe, artfully raking concentric swirls in the sand of the karesansui, a small garden of rocks and sand that mimicked a traditional Japanese landscape of islands in the sea. He wasn't alone; Miyuki could feel the sohei watching, just out of view.
"Good morning, sister."
"Good morning, elder brother. Is the Abbot General here?"
"Yes, they are waiting in the Butsuden."
Miyuki nodded in thanks and walked on to the Temple's main hall, the shuffling sound of the rake fading behind her.

Miyuki knelt before the great golden statue of the Amida Buddha, the two halves of the red wax candle lying on the floor immediately before her. Held up to the light, the candle had immediately revealed its secret; the wax had been poured around a stainless steel capsule, which in turn disgorged a USB flash drive. Miyuki gazed up at the calm, benevolent face of the Buddha two stories above her, while Jeff tried the drive in a laptop, one of the spares that could be sacrificed to an invasive virus, if need be.
"Seems fine." Jeff said, finally. "No traps, no security, Just Excel files and pdfs."
Miyuki didn't really have any expectations, but she felt a twinge of disappointment. Spreadsheets were the most boring things on any computer.
"Great, we've captured Chow's accounting." Miyuki returned Jeff's sideways look. "Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that could have put him in jail, back when he was still breathing."
They sat in silence for awhile, while the Abbot General clicked the beads of his nenju, one by one.
"Younger sister," he said, at length, "bookkeeping, as I'm sure you know is an ongoing process. As security conscious as Chow was, don't you think he'd store his records somewhere he could get at them?"
"He made a lot of decisions I don't really agree with."
"He may not have had much moral fiber, but he was practical when he needed to be. Younger brother, is there anything incriminating in any of those files?"
"Not that I can tell, so-daisho. It looks like shipping info, but the spreadsheets are all code numbers, and the pdfs are scans of manifests, so everything appears under a legit heading." Jeff looked up from his screen. "You couldn't blackmail anyone with this, not by itself."
The three fell back into silence. Incense smoke from a brazier near the statue curled up toward the rafters. A quiet, distant rumble came and went, as an airliner passed overhead.
"Could be a receipt for someone he bought from. Or sold to." Miyuki shrugged. "I dunno, I got nothing. I'm goin' to work."
"You gonna see Alli at the gym today?"
"She's my last appointment, why?"
"Ships are her thing." Jeff handed Miyuki a fresh duplicate of the flash drive. "This is gonna take some digging, and she'll know where to dig."

Walking back to the garage, Miyuki met Minh coming the other way, wiping a socket wrench on an oily rag.
"Hey, where's my car, foo'?" She punched him playfully, but smartly in the shoulder.
"Hey, quit it, girl. It's been done." He led her down a branching tunnel and through a heavy metal door. "We finished last night while you were partying in Chinatown."
On the other side of the door was a garage packed with tools, vehicles, and machine parts, many of which Miyuki didn't recognize. Patrol cars from several local departments stood in a row with trucks from the water and public works departments, Caltrans, and, Miyuki noticed, PG&E. A variety of nondescript sedans mingled with a squadron of specially modified Suzuki street racing bikes, and, in the last space at the end, a fluorescent green Nissan 370Z, heavily customized with carbon fiber body panels, angular ground effects, and a sizeable rear wing. The modified suspension and competition rims helped contribute to the car's aggressive stance; the front clip resembled nothing so much as an angry snake, a motif continued in the Chinese dragons incorporated into the trim decals on both doors. Miyuki let out a girlish squeal and bounded over to the car, running her hand lovingly down the driver's side quarter panel.
"Aw baby, did you miss me?"
"Umm… right. Listen, Elder Sister, before you take her out I gotta tell you about the new setup for the NOS bottles…"
"Yeah, whatever, gimme the keys."
"…bright blue fireball…"
"'Course I can, gimme the keys."
"…mechanical failure all down the drivetrain…"
"Love to, gimme the keys."
Minh shrugged and held out a ring of car keys. The stiffest tree is the most easily cracked, the bamboo survives by bending in the wind.

The old man stood his rake on its handle and admired the karesansui laid out before him. The gravel formed a perfect arrangement of concentric circles and organic curves around the larger rocks and the small, neatly trimmed bonsai, as indeed it had before he had started. It was not the end result that was important.
Outside, a highly tuned engine roared, and tires squealed as a car turned out of a driveway far too quickly.

Clarissa looked from the screen of her laptop to the book lying open on her desk, and then back to the screen again. A line of hieroglyphs, ibises, snakes, elongated hands, ran down the screen, inked millennia ago on a papyrus which, brown and fragile with age, had been carefully scanned into the University's digital archive earlier that month. The same line ran down an illustration in the book, blandly labeled "Figure 36B". A careful scrutiny followed, until she could say with certainty that "Figure 36B" and BANCROFTSCAN2012_9_345498.TIFF were one and the same. She gave her chair a celebratory spin, and then rolled over to the University PC that anchored the far end of her desk. Now came the worst part of solving her little mystery, alerting the database through the clunky and outdated interface, which soldiered on through the great virtue of familiarity.
"Ahem. Miss Harlowe?"
"Professor Balducci?"
"Ah there you are my dear. No, don't get up." An avuncular, bespectacled man in a tweed suit made his way carefully between an upright Egyptian sarcophagus and a precarious stack of cardboard boxes. "This just arrived for you at the reception desk."
Balducci laid a slim book on Clarissa's desk, a new book with a plain blue University Press cover. She flipped past the ex libris plate of the divinity school library to the title page; it was a reprint and transcription of the 1627 Relacao of Fr. Estevao Cacella to Fr. Alberto Laercio, his superior within the Jesuit order.
"That was… surprisingly quick."
"I'm afraid that other book you were asking about is still out, the Library wouldn't recall it for me."
"Oh." Clarissa looked up from the Relacao. The Library handed out favors based on an academic hierarchy, and despite her position as custodian of a small corner of the archaeology department she was still an undergraduate, and wasn't surprised when the recall of a book on her behalf was refused. Professor Balducci, however, was tenured, and had been a university fixture for decades. "Did they tell you who has it?"
"Ah, yes, well. It's Levine, that dog. I imagine he keeps a fair portion of the library in a cabinet in his office simply so the rest of us may not read it."
"Do you think Professor Levine would let me borrow it for an afternoon? It's just for reference purposes." Clarissa leaned forward, and pouted slightly. It was the same expression that, subconsciously, made its way to her face whenever she was about to ask someone for something.
"That he might, but he hasn't been in his office for days. He's probably come down with a case of Napa Valley Cabernet again." Balducci stopped himself. He was an older man, and his mind tended to wander. "You might email him and ask. Will we see you this weekend, at the Vitus Bering Dinner?"
"Oh yes, I wouldn't miss it for anything."

As the Campanile rang five o'clock, Clarissa decided that Balducci had been suggesting that she break into Levine's office. At least that was the excuse she gave herself when she decided she was going to break into Levine's office. She certainly preferred the covert approach to actually talking to the man; he was standoffish and condescending toward her, whether because of her age or her gender she couldn't tell. But worst of all, he a crushing bore, and in love with the sound of his own voice.
She had spent the afternoon entertaining herself with fantastic plans to break into Levine's office, imagining herself scaling the outer wall or rappelling from the roof to gain access to the window, even though she had a utility key that opened the door; she imagined disguising herself as a janitor to enter the office unobtrusively, even though everyone in the building knew who she was, and the disguise she envisioned, a French maid's outfit, would only serve to make her more obvious. She even imagined smuggling herself in an Egyptian sarcophagus delivered to Levine's office, even though his specialty was Assyriology. The more she thought about it, the more it struck Clarissa as odd that an Assyriologist would even want a book on East Asia in the first place.
In the end she waited until most of the professors had left for the day, walked down an empty hallway and, anticlimactically, let herself into Levine's office with the utility key. When she told Miyuki about this later she'd have to say she rappelled through the window. Possibly while wearing a French maid's uniform. No, that was going too far, it had to be one or the other.
The sun hadn't quite fully set yet, but Levine's office was on the East side of the building, and once she had shut the door behind her Clarissa found it dark enough that she had to use her mini maglite to read the bindings of the books that lined the walls. The overhead light would show under the door and out the window, she reasoned, and didn't feel nearly conspiratorial enough. Most of the books dealt with the ancient Middle East, Sumer, Assyria, Babylon. They were exactly what a professor of Assyriology would have, and not what she was looking for. The beam of her flashlight swept past a book lying on Levine's desk and then suddenly darted back. The book was familiar, and well it should be, after all, she had been reading it for the past week; it was the memoirs of Prince Mikhail Vasilievich Obolensky.
Behind her, Clarissa heard footsteps in the hall. She froze, listening until she was certain they were coming nearer. She switched off her light as the footsteps stopped outside the door. A hand tested the knob, and after a pause the door gave a soft rattle; Clarissa had had the presence of mind to lock it behind her, and now someone was picking it open. For lack of a better option she wedged herself under Levine's desk, and held her breath as the door swung open, briefly illuminating the room in the yellow glow of the corridor lights.
The intruder started at the bookcase and worked quickly, and quietly. It sounded like he was sliding the books in and out, searching less for a particular book than, perhaps, something hidden among the books. The footsteps drew nearer, and Clarissa heard Obolensky's book lifted, and then dropped on the desk above her. She held her breath, and, after pushing herself as far under the desk as possible, tried to remain very still.
The footsteps moved around to the back of Levine's desk, and suddenly moved into Clarissa's line of sight. The intruder was a man, of about average size, she guessed. He wore black leather shoes, with rubber soles, and dark colored pants; even if he hadn't come specifically to break in, he was dressed to do so. The drawers around Clarissa rolled open and closed in rapid succession; Levine's desk was large and old, and from her hiding place the noise was tremendous. As the wide, flat drawer right above her head slammed shut, it dislodged a thin composition book which had apparently been taped to the underside of the desk. Instinctively, her hand shot out, catching it silently before it smacked into the floor. Had he seen it fall?
"¿Profesor Levine?" the janitor's familiar voice called through the door, "¿Profesor, es usted?"
The intruder was at the window even before they heard the keys jingling in the door, and casually climbed through it like he was walking out a door. As soon as the man vanished from sight, Clarissa was after him, sidling along a ledge away from the window as the janitor switched on the lights in Levine's office. It had only been a few seconds, but the intruder was already down on the ground, strolling away with his hands in his pockets, as if nothing unusual had happened.
Clarissa had no idea how he had managed it. Her best option, she decided, was a large oak tree that cast a branch toward the wall of the ARF building; it was probably only a few feet away, but with a two story drop below it looked to be miles distant. Grasping the notebook with her teeth, she launched herself from the ledge, grabbing for the branch with both hands. She caught, hung for a second, and then swung her legs up, and shimmied toward the trunk.
The descent cost her a few scratches and destroyed her stockings, but she made it to the ground without losing sight of the intruder as he walked across the plaza and passed the Kroeber Fountain. With the notebook under her arm, Clarissa looked like just another student, albeit one who had just been in a fight with a tree. She chose a different path around the fountain, keeping a discreet distance; if the man had noticed her following him, he didn't react in any way.
As the man approached Bancroft Street at the edge of campus, a big black Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb, and he hopped in the passenger door. It seemed to Clarissa that the car had barely slowed down, it was back mingling with traffic in seconds. As it pulled away, she got a good look at its rear license plate, one of the sky blue plates issued by the State Department to foreign embassies and consulates.
Clarissa repeated the license number twice to herself, and then, not trusting that she would remember it, fumbled in her pocket for a pen. She was at the point of writing the number on her hand when she remembered the notebook. Flipping it open, she scribbled the number quickly in one of the margins before it had a chance to jumble in her mind and then flee completely. Then the streetlight above her flickered to life, and she felt a chill run through her, despite the balmy Indian summer evening. Dr. Levine's notes very closely paralleled her own; the book that he had felt the need to try to hide detailed the beginnings of his own search for the Oracle Sword.