“Still stinging?” Ellis asked. “Tranquilizer dart. We’ve got this new guy, calls himself the Cat. Justifiably, if he got up onto your balcony without waking you. You didn’t hear anything?”

A dream of being stung by an insect. My own uselessness lay on me like a passed-out drunk.

“Just give me the information,” I said.

“Right. So we’ve got her. You can have her back and live happily ever after. All you’ve got to do is kill Grainer.”

I looked up at him. His face was peaceful, dark blue eyes lucid. He returned my stare. “You heard me correctly,” he said.

“Why Grainer?” I asked.

Ellis took a sip of his coffee, swallowed; his Adam’s apple moved in his gullet like a little elbow. “Jake,” he said, “it’s like this. For some time now I’ve been involved with a movement within the organisation. This is a group of people—some from Hunt, some from Tech, some from Finance—who’ve read the writing on the wall. I mean it’s pretty big writing on a pretty big wall: We need you. Literally, you’re our reason for being. Not just you, obviously. The vamps, the demons, the reanimated, the voodoo kids, the Satanists, the djin, the poltergeists, the whole crowd. Problem is the crowd’s getting a tad small . You see this, right?”

Post-9/11 wacko-rumour said the Bush administration had launched the attacks itself, the reward being carte blanche for oil-savvy aggression and a shot in the already steroidal arm for the military-industrial complex. No fear, no funding. Ergo al-Qaeda. Same principle here.

“The guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job,” I said.

“Exactly. My friends and I aren’t prepared to let it happen. It’s okay for Grainer, he’s got money and he’s sick of all this shit anyway. But what’s a guy like me going to do? Flip burgers?”

Not just funding, then. Identity crisis too. Ellis didn’t know anything else. Porn stars talked of the industry as a loving family. The Hunt, I could well imagine, played the same role.

“FYI,” Ellis continued, “there are now two WOCOPs. World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena, and World Organisation for the Creation of Occult Phenomena. We’re not out. In all likelihood we never really will be. But under our influence things are going to change. We’re going to save what’s in danger of being lost forever.”

“By killing Grainer?”

“You have no idea, Jake, how much clout the guy has. It’s not just him. There’sa nucleus, a damned junta. They’re controlling funding, recruitment, research, policy, media. Half of them are cynics robbing the organisation blind and the other half are zealots who don’t realise they’re cheerleading themselves into redundancy.”

“I had you pegged as a zealot,” I said.

Ellis shook his head with a sort of benevolent disappointment. “I’m a pragmatist, Jake. Always have been. I thought you knew that.”

“And when you kill Grainer—sorry, when you get me to kill Grainer—what then? A coup d’état? Or are you picking the generals off one by one?”

“We don’t want a bloody revolution,” he said, then swallowed the last of his coffee and put the cup down on the floor. “The organisation’s too unstable and our numbers too small. We’re looking at three, maybe four key deaths in the U.K. cabal. A dozen in the States. We don’t want to overdo it. We’re looking at quietly making our presence felt . Gentle steering. You see how this would work? The zealots, admittedly, have got to go, and Grainer’s a zealot to the core, but the cynics can be persuaded. Either to go voluntarily or to stop abusing the organisation. Not a bloody revolution, but not an entirely velvet one, either.”

“Then you don’t need me,” I said. “Just kill Grainer yourself. In fact you have to for the threat of your group to be credible.”

“I am going to kill him,” he said. “It’ll be me replacing the silver ammo with regular shit. You just provide the camouflage, Jake. It’s the perfect faux cover. We have to let these guys know we did it without giving them the means to prove it. They’re connected in the straight world. We could face regular legal prosecution if we don’t get it right.”

“You’ve left it a bit late, haven’t you?” I said. “I mean, there’s only me left. What difference is keeping me alive going to make?”

He looked at me, almost smiling. “Nice, Jake. But there’s you and her. You didn’t know if we knew about her. You had to find out. We do.”

A slender hope, but worth a try.

“Grainer knows about her?”

“No. Just my people.”

My inner strategist was working through the terror. Grainer doesn’t know about her. Is that any good? Can we use that? Not sure. Give me a minute.

“Okay,” I said. “So there’s me and her. That’s two of us. Big deal. Hardly enough for a Hunt renaissance.”

For a moment Ellis didn’t reply, indeed seemed to attend to some frequency only he could hear. Then returned, with a short sigh. “Jake,” he said. “Oh, boy. You have no idea what’s going on. I don’t even know where to start.”

My scalp shrank. I didn’t want him to start. The details, in any case, wouldn’t matter. All that mattered was that some giant First Principles error had produced fantastic false ramifications. Now everything you thought you knew … Everything you were sure was … Didn’t you see this coming? You, the big reader ?

“We’ve cracked the antivirus,” Ellis said.

The temptation to say “What?” though I’d heard him perfectly was all but overwhelming. I resisted, just.

“Serendipitously, too,” he said. “I guess it’s always like that with the big discoveries, a bit of raw meat falls on the fire and voilà! —cooking. Anyway, we’ve got your girl to thank.”

For the werewolf, but they’d hit me. In the calf. A tranquilizer, presumably, since a moment later I was out like a light .

No, angel. Not a tranquilizer. Jesus Christ.

“Is Alfonse Mackar dead or not?” I asked.

“He’s dead,” Ellis said. “He died the night he ran into Talulla in the desert, though he wasn’t killed by us. Some local amateur outfit in a fucking Jeep . Can you believe it? We had to recruit them to shut them up. Seriously, Jake, it’s a circus out there, a free-for-all. Every teenager with a smelting kit and a diploma in Buffy . I mean there was a time when—”