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overweight but still visibly muscular under his dark blue golf shirt, stood up from the couch.
    "What's going on?" Thomas Woeshack, an Aleut Eskimo agent, and the youngest and least experienced member of the covert team, asked, having failed to recognize the critical words in Takahara's side of the phone conversation.
    "Hopefully, nothing too serious," Takahara said as he and Woeshack quickly strapped on their own shoulder-holstered weapons. "Just Henry doing what he seems to do best."
    "Yeah, what's that?"
    "Acting like a human magnet for every little piece of trouble that happens to cross his path," the tech agent replied.
     
     
    The alley that Henry Lightstone selected had a number of useful advantages.
    First of all, it was entirely surrounded by two-story brick warehouses, most of which looked as if they'd been built in the early fifties. Secondly, about halfway in, the alley made a sharp ninety-degree angle to the left, so that the back half couldn't be seen from the street. And finally, the electrical wiring in the few remaining light fixtures over the few locked doorways had apparently either shorted out or simply rotted away long ago. As a result, the only light available in the rearmost and hidden section of the alley came from the diffuse cloud reflections overhead.
    It was, by its very nature, a cold, dark, and foreboding place. And given its immediate proximity to the city of Boston's infamous Combat Zone, it was exactly the kind of place that streetwise residents and innocent tourists alike would have instinctively avoided like the plague.
    But being neither a resident of Boston nor a tourist, Henry Lightstone continued walking until he was within fifty feet of the dead end. Then he stopped, turned around, stood in the middle of the alleyway, and waited.
    It didn't take them long. And thanks to the echoing effects of the high brick walls, not to mention the decade-long accumulation of dirt, rocks, trash, and other miscellaneous debris scattered about on the cobblestone roadway, Lightstone heard them coming long before they appeared.
    To Henry Lightstone's amazement, both men actually seemed to be startled by his sudden appearance, as though it hadn't occurred to either of them that they might actually be confronted in a dark alleyway by the object of their hunt.
    Or more likely, their surveillance, he thought, deciding that in spite of their scroungy and menacing appearance, neither of these men looked much like a member of an opportunistic mugger team.
    So what did you expect, that I was going to run blind into a dark alley and cower in a corner? Or that I was going to lead you right into the back door of the safe house? Christ, what the hell did they tell you guys about this deal? Or more to the point, what didn't they tell you?
    But in spite of their visible surprise, both men recovered quickly.
    "Well, well, well, look what we have here," the Hispanic-featured man said.
    One of them was tall, black, heavyset, dark bearded, and dressed in heavy boots, blue jeans, a military surplus overcoat, and a dark watch cap. The other was of Hispanic origin, Puerto Rican, Lightstone guessed. Shorter by about six inches, lighter by a hundred pounds or so, and dressed almost exactly like his scowling companion, except that his jeans were tight and made from some kind of fake-aged gray-black denim. Both men were wearing tight black gloves, and the taller of the two was now holding what appeared at first to be a heavy bicycle chain in his right hand, except that Lightstone could see small bladelike protrusions poking out along the outer edge of the chain at about two-inch intervals.
    For a brief moment it occurred to Henry Lightstone to wonder where a mugger in the city of Boston would have found a chain-saw chain.
    The two men had positioned themselves in an angled line across the alley so as to block any escape. And since the taller one had deliberately placed himself in the background, Lightstone decided that the smaller