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  Then he wasn't running anymore, and a dark red pool was spreading over the pavé from under his crumpled body. I hadn't heard a shot, and the kid hadn't made a sound, other than the dusty scuffling sound his body'd made when it hit the stones. Our lieutenant didn't seem that surprised, though. "Did you get it?" he asked the corporal. "Quickly!" The corporal nodded, simultaneously waving forward one of his companions, who gave him something too small for me to see, which the corporal plugged into a slot in a hardcover notebook. The new frère gave a thumbsup, and picked up a wicked-looking, bloated rifle. Then he stepped out into the street, raised the gun, fired, and stepped back into the shelter offered by the pockmarked wall. Somewhere out of my line of vision, a building exploded.

  It sounded like he'd blown up half the city. It was like being inside a thunderstorm, and I instinctively put my hands over my ears in a too-late attempt to protect them. The incredible noise was still rumbling when our lieutenant picked up another crudely woven bag, handed it to me and said, "Go."

  I'd been numb up to that point, just watching what was happening without really seeing it. When my hand closed on the bag's handle and I felt the hemp fibers scratching my palm, it was as if I'd suddenly come to the surface of a warm lake and broken into clear, freezing air. That was the moment I realized that Sissy was dead. That we were all dead. No point in kidding myself; they'd probably killed her within a day of raiding the Dialtone. There were all sorts of ways it could have happened. None of them mattered to me. "Fuck the lot of you," I said quietly, and walked into the street.

  I didn't run. What was the point? I walked as though I were just on my way to the corner to buy lunch. If I could have, I'd have whistled a jaunty tune, something from Maurice Chevalier or Boy George. My mouth was too dry to make a properly jaunty sound.

  I passed the trustafarian, lying dusty and broken on the cobbles. I made a point of looking at the spot from which the killing shot must have come and was surprised to see that the building at the end of the block was mostly still there. That huge explosion, whose final basso still echoed, had come from the destruction of just one room. The chambre and its window – and, presumably, the Blanc sniper hiding there – had been plucked from the building's structure like a bad tooth. And now I was taking my little walk so that our lieutenant could see whether any more snipers waited. Now I realize that this is what it means to fight building to building, room to room. At the time, I thought nothing. Felt nothing. Just walked.

  No shot came. No expanding round ripped open my back and spread my lungs out like wings behind me.

  I reached the building that was my goal and discovered that the fire team was already moving through it, into its courtyard and beyond to the next block. A solitary, grimy frère waited for me. Grabbing the bag, he spat at my feet and hustled to join his comrades. I guess he didn't appreciate my sangfroid.

  By the time our lieutenant and the others had caught up to me, I'd had a chance to do some thinking. I stripped off the stiff new T-shirt and web belt and buried them in some rubble. I didn't know what they represented, but I was pretty damned sure they had something to do with the way our lieutenant had been able to pinpoint the location of the sniper who'd killed Scrawny. The frères might kill me, but I was going to see that they didn't benefit in any way from it.

  We were hustled through the ruined building in the wake of the fire team. Another body lying in the next street gave mute evidence to the existence of another Blanc sniper somewhere. Our lieutenant pointed to the ammo bag beside the body – which I now saw was that of the grimy frère I'd forced to play catch-up – and said to me, "No sense in letting that go to waste. Pick it up as you go."

  I smiled broadly. "Glad to," I said. "You might as well keep your computer locked up, though." I spread my hands and shrugged. "No belt. No T-shirt. No service." I'm pretty sure I giggled; the whole scene had the surreality of a night in a trustafarian club.

  Before our lieutenant could say or do anything, though, a frère wearing a headset stepped between us. "Lieutenant," he said, "Monsieur le sergeant Abalain wants to speak to you."

  Just like that, our lieutenant's face had the same pallor as the dead trustafarian's. I was impressed; I hadn't thought an officer could be that scared of a noncom, even one as reptilian as Abalain. Our lieutenant took the headset and put it on. He closed his eyes as he listened.

  I sipped from the Tigger glass Abalain had given to me. The wine was a good one – rich and full, tannins almost gone but still tasting a bit of blackberry. I guessed it had been in someone's cellar for a good few years before being called on to do its bit for the cause. Forcing myself to think about the wine was a deliberate attempt to keep my emotions in check. It had been nearly twentyfour hours since I'd been pulled from death duty, and I think I'd only stopped shaking just before being brought to Abalain's office. I have a vague memory of my fear and rage bursting from me as I was being led away from the carnage, of kicking the death-duty lieutenant in the balls. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking.

  For some reason, it occurred to me as I sipped that it had been weeks since I'd had a cigarette. Not only did the wine taste better, I seemed to have been too busy or too frightened to go through withdrawal. "Does this mean that I'm free to go?"

  Abalain laughed, the sound of a padlock rattling against a graveyard gate. "I admire your sense of humor, monsieur," he said. "Know that, if I could, I'd send you back to your place in the Rue Texas. My report on our little chat about your work has been read with interest by important people. Accordingly, I've been ordered to give you a new opportunity to serve the cause."

  The next day I reported to the office next door to Abalain's. It wasn't furnished nearly as nicely, but it wasn't a cellar and there was nobody shooting at me, so I decided I was better off. I never saw either the lieutenant or any of my fellow targets again. I confess I didn't really worry about them either.

  Abalain had told me to meet him in order to learn about my new assignment. I was pretty sure I already knew what it was, and while waiting for him to show I decided to investigate. I couldn't help myself; when presented with a mass of data I have
to know what it is, and the battered metal desk that dominated the room was a pictorial definition of "mass of data." There were three distinct piles on top of the desk; the talus slopes of their near collapse pretty much covered the entire surface. Two of the piles were paper, the third was of various storage media: magneto-optical disks, a couple of ancient Zips, and even a holocube or two.

  The paper pile nearest to me consisted of various official garbage: press releases, wire story printouts. The ones I looked at were all from either the UN or one of the three main Blanc organizations. The other pile was a series of virtually indecipherable French-language documents that I was eventually able to identify as field reports from Libertine officers and operatives.

  "You can make some sense of that, yes?" Abalain stood in the doorway.

  I looked him in the eye for a second, then returned to the reports. "What kind of sense do you want me to make?"

  "You will do what you described to me when you were first – ah – recruited. I have need of information which I suspect is buried within these reports and press releases. You will use your skills to draw that information forth." He smiled at me with what he no doubt thought was encouragement. Maybe he'd been a management consultant before deciding that the revolution offered better opportunities to fuck with people. "You will work here, and send the information to me as you assemble it. You will use the clipboard and wearable that are in the upper right-hand drawer; they connect to a fiberoptic pipe linked directly to a secure folder on my desktop. You will, regrettably, have no outside access. But don't worry about that; I'll see that you get all of the information you need to do your work."

  More than enough information, I told myself.

"I gotta admit, I just don't understand this revolution."

  "What's not to understand?" Abalain offered me a Marlie; I was somewhat surprised at the gesture, and even more surprised to find myself shaking my head. "We're not really revolutionaries, you know. We're trying to restore the glories of French civilization; in a way, that makes us conservatives."

  
I believe the accepted term is "reactionaries
," I thought. "Which no doubt explains why so many of your slogans seem to have been drawn from fast-food advertising," I said, waving a flimsy at him. " 'La France: Have It Your Way'?"

  "The fast-food philosophy is inherently French," Abalain said. "It's a peasant philosophy, not some tarted-up bourgeois hautecuisine thing. It's like the epoxy cobbles you and your 'Old Paree Hands' are so dismissive about. They're perfectly in keeping with the scientific rationalism of the original revolution." He spoke in crisp, rapid French. He'd caught me listening too intently to one of his phone conversations the week before and confronted me with a barrage of French. When my facial expression made it clear that I understood every word, he'd nodded smartly and went back to his conversation, as though he'd suspected it all along.

  "Unless they're laid down by Disney," I said.

  "Then it's cultural imperialism," Abalain said. I'd have liked him just a little if he'd smiled, or showed any sign of having a sense of humor. But he was deadly serious, and I hated him even more for it.

  "So what's your part in all this?" I asked. "You a spook?"

  "I'm nothing of the sort, Monsieur Rosen. And if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell you." He blew a jet of smoke past my left ear; I smelled burning garbage. "I'm just a servant of the Commune," he said. "I do what I can to bring France back into the sunlight of scientific rationalism. Please know that we are all grateful for the assistance you have been providing."

  And that you've been taking credit for, I thought. "I could do more," I said, "if I had access to more information." What I'd been given so far wouldn't have been enough to help a fundamentalist preacher track down sin. I had to be able to make a big score in order for my plan to work.

  "I've been impressed with what you've given me to date," Abalain said.
Jesus
, I thought.
If they're impressed by that merde,
this will be easier than I thought.
"Granted it hasn't had much direct tactical value. But already we've been able to wrong-foot the Penistes at least twice in the media. We've taken the lead in the propaganda campaign; in the long run that may be as important as anything our fighters do."

  "At least let me see the uncensored field reports." I pulled a handful of crumpled flimsies from a pants pocket. Two-thirds of the text had been blacked or blanked. "I should be the judge of whether or not information is usable."

  "I'll see what I can do," he said.

The next morning an unhappy-looking frère kicked a plastic box into my office. The papers, flimsies, and chips were chaos illustrated, but I didn't care. I always get a rush from a fresh source of data, and the rush was greater this time because the stakes were so much higher.

  One of the first things I learned when I finally got down to analysis was that my old ami Commandant Ledoit was dead. The first reference was in a press release from a couple of weeks ago; he'd been killed, it was claimed, by the Blancs. But it didn't take much sleuthing to suss out that he had in fact been dusted by the Commune. I found a reference to a series of denunciations by Abalain's juniors, and while the accusations weren't detailed the result was still clear enough. If I hadn't already had my suspicions raised, that would have set my spideysense tingling.

  As it was, I was more grimly satisfied than surprised. Every revolution eventually eats its young, someone once said. For the Paris Commune, the buffet had apparently begun. That was fine for me; in fact, my plan depended on it.

  I worked hard over the next week. After what I'd been through, there was a deep, almost rich pleasure in being able to throw myself into investigation. Little by little I spun my web – making sure that I also took the time to generate some truly killer conclusions about what the Blancs and Penistes were up to. It was actually pretty easy. Compared with most corporations, governments are as complex as nap time at a daycare. And neither the Blancs nor the Penistes – nor the Commune, come to that – was even a government by any normal conception of that word. So it was only a few days after I started when Abalain brought me a bottle of really good Remy by way of congratulating me on my utter fabness. I'm more of a bourbon than a cognac type, but I accepted the bottle anyway. It was the least Abalain could do for me; I intended to make sure of that.

  After he gave me the bottle, I didn't see the sergeant for two weeks. I took advantage of the break to wander around the building, and eventually even the neighborhood. It hadn't taken long for word to get out that Abalain had himself a pet spook, and nobody really paid any attention to the grubby guy in the soiled white suit. That dusted whatever doubts I may have had about Abalain's juice within the Commune; the man wore his sergeant's stripes like sheep's clothing.