“So you live with it. It can’t be that infectious any more, can it?”

“No; you’re safe. Everyone’s safe. I’m barely infectious now.” Now that he was smoking again he was calming down a little. The bleeding had stopped and he was able to slip his wounded hand back in his pocket. He took a sip from his pisco sour. “Sometimes I wish it was still infectious, or that I’d saved some of my blood from back when I got infected. It would have made a nice going-away present, a little shot of that in someone’s vein.”

“Except you’d be doing what the cultists always wanted you to do,” Dieterling said. “Spreading their creed.”

“Yeah, when instead I should be spreading the creed that if I ever catch the sick fuck who did this to me…” He trailed off, distracted by something. He stared into the middle distance, like a man undergoing some kind of paralytic seizure, then spoke. “No. No way, man. I don’t believe it.”

“What is it?” I said.

Vasquez’s voice dropped subvocal, though I could see the way his neck muscles kept on moving. He must have been wired for communication with one of his people.

“It’s Reivich,” he said finally.

“What about him?” I asked.

“The fucker’s outsmarted me.”

TWO

A maze of dark, damp passages connected Red Hand’s establishment to the interior of the bridge terminal, threading right through the structure’s black wall. He led us through the labyrinth with a torch, kicking rats out of the way.

“A decoy,” he said wonderingly. “I never figured he’d setup a decoy. I mean, we’ve been following this fucker for days.” He said the last word as if it should have been months at the very least; implying superhuman foresight and planning.

“The lengths some people’ll go to,” I said.