“Wanna go out later?” Jerry asked. “I’m meeting a coupla guys in a club.”

“I’ll pass,” I told him. “It’s been a long day.”

Pizza finished, we took the elevator up, Jerry to the sixteenth, me a couple of stories higher. Offices were few and far between up here. Most petered out at the fourteenth. The Cardinal occupied the fifteenth. Beyond that sprawled the legendary floors of files — room after room packed with newspapers, reports, data sheets, populace surveys, birth and death certificates, volumes of city history, housing plans, income tax returns. The myth ran that The Cardinal had a detailed dossier on every one of the city’s millions. That couldn’t be true, of course, but he probably had something on the majority of them.

I made the rounds of the mainly deserted rooms, breaking off two or three times an hour to meander down the stairs and back up again. I ran into other similarly deployed Troops a couple of times but we never acknowledged one another’s presence.

I was on my way up from the third floor at about half past nine when Frank came storming down, his face a furious twist of lines.

“Jeery!” he snapped. “What are you doing on these stairs? Haven’t you heard they’re off-limits?”

I paused, wondering if he was joking or testing me. “You want me off the stairs?” I asked cautiously.

“Of course I want you off the fucking—,” he started to roar, then caught himself and forced the bleakest of grins. “I know what I said earlier, but those orders are canceled, OK?”

“OK.”

Frank studied my face, daring me to question him. When I didn’t, he relaxed slightly and drew a long, disparaging breath. “Know what the crazy bastard’s done now? Ripped three-quarters of the guard out of the yard. Told me it was an exercise.”

“What do you reckon he’s up to?” I asked.

“Fucked if I know,” Frank replied. “Seems like he’s clearing the way for an invasion. There’s a gap out back that you could drive a fleet of tanks through. But what do I know? I’m just the head of this goddamn army. I’m a nobody.”