"Yes." The voice, rich and modulated, came from several sources at once. The speakers were mounted unobtrusively inside the walls, and when the voice spoke, it seemed to surround the empty table. "Excellent, Circe. A true success. Even to the American's dying word."

"Abraxas," she said softly, the word forming through a cloud of white tobacco smoke.

The tone of the voice from the walls changed. "But this is only the beginning. There is still much to be done. At the conference we will begin our real work. The conference, I trust, is ready to convene?"

"Nearly," Circe answered. "We have had some difficulty in locating one of the delegates. But he has been found. He will be approached today."

"Which one?"

"The computer expert," she said, squinting through the smoke into the sunlight. "The one named Smith. Harold W. Smith, of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York."

?Chapter Two

His name was Remo and he was on fire. The flames lapped up his back, disintegrating his shirt as he leaped from one burning building to another.

They were tenements, crumbling, flat-topped monoliths in New York's South Bronx, where the streets were awash with smoldering garbage and sang with the wild shrieks of rats and frightened children. Remo hit the second building's roof, rolled onto his back to extinguish the fire, then without missing stride proceeded onto the third building in the blazing row. Mixed with the stench of burning mattresses and the insulation that smoldered in black columns around him, his fine senses could also pick out the smell of his own singed hair and the sickening odor of charred flesh.

He had been able to empty the buildings. Most of the people inside had made it to what shelter lay in the streets. The lucky ones would spend the night in a hospital. For the uninjured, though, only the night with its gangs and murderers and rapists remained. The arsonist had seen to it that a lot of people would get turned into prey for the city's predators this night.