Max pointedly refused to do anything more than discuss take-out options for dinner that night as we rode downtown, prompting our sour-faced driver to extol the virtues of his native cuisine. These uninvited comments inevitably led to a diatribe about the injustice of his country's having become, since its total degeneration into anarchy and violence after the '07 crash, a United Nations protectorate. Max told him to just shut the hell up and drive, inspiring the bitter little man to handle both steering and brakes in a fashion unquestionably designed to induce nausea. All in all, I was confused, sickened and fairly irritated by the time we got back to Max's building; and my mood wasn't improved when my friend jumped out of the vehicle, closed the door before I could follow and said, "This is gonna take a few hours. Go home, I'll call you."

Before I could argue, he was inside, leaving me alone with the Indonesian zealot. I elected to pay the driver off and try my luck in another cab for the trip down to Tribeca. But the world is full of people with axes to grind, and an inordinate number of them have always ended up driving New York City cabs; and so my journey down the upper level of the West Side Superhighway was no more pleasant than the trip from Central Park had been..

I was still thinking about all those grinding axes when I got back to my loft. Killing time until Max's phone call, I switched on my computer, printed out the first section of the late edition of the New York Times, then settled into my couch with a bottle of Lithuanian vodka and started leafing through the paper, the experiences of the day and evening making me see the stories it contained in other than the usual trusting light. Suddenly no piece of information seemed entirely reliable, and I was reminded of Thomas Jefferson's admonition that a citizen can only be truly informed if he or she ignores the newspapers. Specifically, the Times reported the details of half a dozen hot spots around the world in which the U.S. was either diplomatically or militarily involved; and it seemed increasingly possible that because of the Khaldun business, Afghanistan would shortly be added to the list. I found myself wondering if computer discs containing bizarre, undiscovered information about all those other crises existed; and in that unsettled state of mind I drifted off to sleep.

Several hours later, I was woken by the sound of my vacuum cleaner charging out of the hall closet and then following a series of electronic sensors under the carpet in an effort to carry out its cleaning program. This sort of thing had been happening with increasing frequency lately: never much of a housekeeper, I'd dropped a bundle on one of those "smart apartment" setups, only to watch it go mad over the ensuing weeks and try to clean up, make coffee, adjust the lighting and God only knew what else at all hours of the day and night, generally with stunning inefficiency.

Cursing the brilliant soul who'd shrunk microchips to the size of molecules and made such supposedly "smart" systems possible, I began unsteadily pursuing the vacuum cleaner around the loft. I'd no sooner corralled the thing and shut it off than the phone began to ring; and I just managed to get it before my answering service, which was almost as brilliant as my vacuum cleaner, had time to route the call to my cell phone.

On answering I once again heard Max's voice: "Get up here--I broke the encryption, and I've got a crap load of other stuff too. Jesus, Gideon, this deal is getting spooky..."

Another lousy cab ride later and I was back at Max's. I found him switching on the various systems he used to jam and otherwise thwart listening devices, after which he guided me over to a stack of DNA sequencing and identification equipment near a window that had a beautiful view of the river.

"I found a few hairs embedded in the brick wall at the murder scene," Max explained, indicating the buzzing equipment. "I ran them through my remote terminal while we were there, but what I got back didn't seem to make any sense, so I wanted to try it again on the big rig. Results came up the same. A few of the samples belong to John Price, but the rest? The rest match a guy who's in jail." MORE>>

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