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Muslims?” Lox asked.
    “Sort of,” Aida agreed. “But they’re not Muslim. To the extent they’re anything, I suppose they’re Catholic . . . or maybe Christian Animist. Or maybe some kind of heresy I’ve never heard of. But Muslim they definitely are not.
    “What’s bothering you?” she asked. “The tattoos? I’m not sure what they mean—can’t read the code in any detail—but I’d guess he’s pretty high up in their chain of command.”
    Lox shook his head. “It’s not the tattoos,” he whispered. “He’s packing. He just got off a commercial airplane and he’s packing.”
    Aida looked a bit below the tattooed face and shrugged. “Yeah, he’s packing. Go figure: Filipino carrier and I’m sure he got himself enrolled as a reservist in our equivalent of the States’ Sky Marshal program. No surprise. Maybe some money but no surprise.
    “They call themselves a nation and they’re serious about it,” she said. “They’re their own nation, in us but not of us. And why not? They judge. They tax. They police . . . in the area they control they police better than regular police did. But they recognize no obligations to the rest of us. Citizenship is something they use when they get caught outside their own area to try to keep out of jail, a pure one-way street. Beyond it, being a Filipino means nothing to them.”
    Lox sighed and said, “ Sic transit Nussbaum?”
    “Huh? Nussbaum?” Aida asked.
    “An academic and cosmopolitan philosopher of a few years back,” Lox explained. “Among other things, she insisted that the logic of nationalism and patriotism required the drawing of ever narrower circles of in and out groups. Seemed incapable of observing that, in the real world beyond her brainpan, it’s the breakdown of nations that causes people to fall back to ever narrower circles, while nations have so far proven the only thing—besides religion—capable of creating larger circles of acceptance. Silly woman tried to reason with a mob once, during the Great Chicago Ipad-9 riots. They tore her limb from limb.
    “He”—Lox pointed with his chin at the tattooed TCS leader—“is an affront to and refutation of her world view. Then, too, so was the mob that killed her.”
    Aida shrugged; the fantasies of the intellectual class interested her little. “I suppose,” she said, “based on some things that Ralph Boxer told me, that they’re a little like your organization that way.”
    “No, ma’am . . . Aida,” Terry replied. “We’re both symptoms of breakdown, yes. But M Day is only a symptom, not a cause of the breakdown. And even there, we’re more like the fever that helps fight off disease. Large criminal gangs owing no duties to anybody outside of the gang? They’re both symptom and cause.”
    “As are fuzzy minded intellectuals and academics,” Lox added.

    Aida’s auto stopped on the same narrow, palm-lined street, not far from the gated gap in the hedges that led to Paloma’s meeting house. Through iron gates Terry had caught glimpses of small, but well-kept bungalows, many of them raised on thick stilts.
    “Through that one,” Aida said, pointing with her chin as her hands were still tightly wrapped around the wheel. “Expect armed men on the other side, maybe three or four of them. Maybe only one or two, too. Expect to be frisked.”
    Terry nodded, saying, “Thanks, ma . . . ummm . . . Aida.” Lox added in a Tagalog farewell in the polite form. From a shirt pocket Terry took out a thick envelope, which he handed over to the woman.
    “What’s this?” she asked, a hint of indignation rising in her voice. Gnarled fingers bent the envelope a few times, then squeezed it experimentally. “I didn’t strong arm Boxer for money!”
    “Officially,” Terry replied, “I don’t know. Unofficially, Boxer told me it was airfare to our base—Swiss Francs because who knows where the dollar is going—plus some, if you cared to join us someday. He said, ‘keep it, save