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currency and its strategic disadvantages.
    Fiat currency—currency defined by a government rather than backed by physical assets—was a pejorative among believers in the gold standard.
    The area around his spiky interface began to grow warm. Terabytes of data were now flooding from the open Talos servers into Fouad's arm.
    Too long a connection might actually sear a blood vessel, but this was important.
    Axel Price was not the man Fouad would ever visualize at the center of a high-powered conference on international finance. He was not trusted in Europe. His connections to Israel had long since grown stale, mirroring the return of a general disenchantment with Jews inside the extreme American right.
    Any connection between Price and MSARC would be very interesting in some circles.
    The button was causing pain.
    The dataflow abruptly ended with a cartoon grunt face—a Talos security guard in full armor and regalia raising night-vision gogs, spinning his assault rifle, and winking.
    Done!
    The black square of the maintenance window closed.
    Records of Fouad's access instantly vanished.
    All the data—the reason for his entire mission—now suffused through his blood, downloaded at the source of the plug into thousands of microscopic data stores, amalgams of protein and silicon called prochines . The prochines would spend the next hour exchanging data with their blood-borne fellows, performing a kind of bio-backup, until millions of copies spread throughout his body.
    Security at Talos was comprehensive and superb, but so far, nobody knew about prochines, nor, had they known, would they have been able to detect them without drawing and analyzing enough blood to kill him.
    Fouad needed to get this information out of Lion City quickly. Given the conditions of constant surveillance and the county-wide blanket of sensor chips, and given that his contract did not allow for vacations or travel outside of the campus, the original plan had been for him to be informed of a family emergency within the next few weeks—the timing to be widely separated from this intrusion, in the unlikely event it were ever detected.
    But the conference was scheduled to begin in fourteen days. He needed to communicate with his handlers immediately.
    And there was only one way he might succeed at doing that, undetected—something almost as antiquated as carrier pigeons, of which he had none.
    Fouad left the cage, which locked its door behind him with a confident, steely chunk .

Chapter Eight

    Dubai

    The hours passed. The dust storm blew over and the color outside the window blinds went golden, then dark.
    Nathaniel Trace flew in and out of a hypnogogic fantasy . . . Trees and roads all around, wind in his hair, and then a chingaling in one ear, like chimes, pretty but not at all soothing.
    His phone telling him he had a call.
    Interrupting the lazy flow.
    He scrunched his lids tight, then opened them wide.
    Dark in the room.
    Dark outside.
    Tree patterns painted on dark walls, windows, furniture. He pushed back against the visuals. He had taken the sedative hours ago. It hadn't knocked him out—not completely.
    Now the chemistry was conflicting with whatever else was happening in his body. He was starting to feel really bad. Afraid, and not excited about it. The fear was real. The evil was here, right beside him, right here on the bed, a dark, writhing tangle of tree limbs—he could feel them scrape and poke but he couldn't see them, not now.
    The room lights came up to dim gold in response to his movement. He rolled over and stared at the empty, creased sheets. Bunched pillows filled with leering ghost faces.
    The blinds were drawn. Airplane warning lights on skyscrapers blinked red between the cracks in the blinds.
    Chimes again.
    He grabbed the phone, an expensive EPR unit. His fingerprint confirmed him and the phone completed the connection. "Yeah," he croaked. "It's me. I think."
    The screen demanded another answer code. He fumbled with the