Description: MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2009 1:12 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME 5 Jaguar (Empowering Clarity) "A sex caper?" Pam Blackwell said skeptically. "My name isn't Mata Hari." "And I'm not Heidi Fleiss," Max August answered. "But honey traps have existed as long as spies have, because they work." "I suppose so, but still kind of ballsy, no?" Both of them chuckled in the sweltering night. They were lying on a blanket spread over the sand, on a hill in the ass-end of Arizona, watching the sky above. An hour after midnight, it was still eighty-seven degrees with no breeze at all. But this far from pollution and city lights, the sky was brilliant, blazing with stars, planets, and the satellites that swept across the expanse like clockwork. Pam was twenty-nine years old. Max was thirty-five even though he'd been born in 1950, and he'd be thirty-five until somebody killed him, because he was Timeless. Both were blond, he with hazel eyes and her with blue. They could have been two lovers on a picnic-which, in fact, they were-but they were also two alchemists, and they were going to war. Max said, "Everybody thinks with their body sometimes, lady." His features were striking, dominated by the full mouth of the deejay he'd once been. That mouth produced a voice just as striking, deep and rich and round. Pam studied his silhouette against the night, and said, "Everybody wants a relationship. Every thing wants a relationship, because everything is related-the first magickal secret you ever told me." "Mike and Di are no different. They want each other and they're coming together like crashing meteors." He gestured toward the sky, which was devoid of meteors. "See if you can shoot this down. We've got time." "Okay." She put her hands behind her head and stretched. "Well," he said, "Dave does data mining for me. It's small-scale, but he's only looking for a few things. One is intelligence concerning Michael Salinan and Diana Herring." Pam's eyes narrowed as she ran the information she'd gathered over the year and a half she and Max had been together. Dave was his computer jedi. Michael Salinan was a well-known political guru, usually but not always right-wing, and Diana Herring ran Full Resource Channel, which owned radio and television stations of all networks all across America. Several years before, Dave had uncovered a relationship between Michael and Diana that suggested a love affair, though they'd tried hard to hide it-just as they'd tried to hide their membership in a cabal known only by the initials "FRC," or three words beginning with those initials. The FRC had run the American government during the Bush/Cheney years, embedding its people throughout the bureaucracy to maintain as much control as possible after Obama took over, and judging from the results, they'd succeeded. Rather than end the wars as promised, the government had recently announced its intent to assassinate American citizens if it wanted. This was duly reported to the citizens months afterward at the bottom of page A-12 and most people missed it. But for Max and Pam, "of, by, and for the People" was not just a slogan, the way it was to the FRC. "Dave discovered a run of credit card numbers that seemed to have been dropped down a black hole," Max went on. "Everything before that run was issued, and everything after, but those cards were just gone. So he kept an eye out. One of them was used last month to buy tickets for Wickr under an assumed name, and Dave applied his standard cross-checks. He traced the transaction as far as KSN-TV in Wichita and then hit a brick wall, at first, but he checked the station's FedEx shipments and found one to a hotel on the south side of Chicago. There was no record of what happened there, but Diana operates her FRC out of Chicago, so he kept going and found airline tickets on the same card, from O'Hare and Dulles, both to Las Vegas, arriving later today. And Wickr starts today, three hours north of Vegas." "Nice work on Dave's part," Pam said. "I couldn't even master Windows. But what's the deal with Wickr? You've been before, right?" "I went in ninety-eight. It was a whole lot smaller and more intimate than it is now, but I doubt if the vibe has changed. It's a festival in the high desert during the week leading up to the Midsummer solstice. Upwards of fifty thousand people, all ages and persuasions, come together to live in an instant city far from view; there is a lot of energy. It's held at the base of the Silver Peak Mountains, at a point where the hills sweep into the distance like stone wings. On either side of that point, Wickr plants two two-hundred-and-twenty-foot towers. A fifty-foot sphere made of curved wooden slats, like massive rattan, simple and primitive, hangs one hundred feet in the air, suspended from a cable on an arc between the towers. That's the Sun; it hangs above the landscape, swaying in the breeze, all week. Then, at the Midsummer solstice, it's raised all the way up to two hundred feet and set ablaze against the sky. The solstice moves forward a quarter of a day every year, so the Burn takes place whenever Midsummer comes-morning, afternoon, evening, middle of the night. You get a different gathering every year, depending on who's awake. This year's the evening year; the best blaze, biggest crowd, biggest party." "Is it a straight takeoff on the old Wicker Man festival?" Pam asked, interested. When we started, Pam thought, there was so much to take in. But you get inside it and it's simple. "Eight festivals mark out the year, at each of the four seasons and the four points halfway between. We met on one-Hallowe'en. Wicker Man's for Midsummer, the longest day of the year, when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky and the Earth is in the fullest of bloom below. Both sides at their most radiant-because after Midsummer, the Sun will grow lower in the sky and the Earth's vegetation will fade, and we puny humans certainly have no control over whether they'll do it again next year. So everywhere in the world, humans came together and showed off their own considerable life-force with sex and sacrifice-usually an animal but sometimes a man if they were really worried about how things were going." Max's hand found hers on the blanket, and he chuckled. "As far as I know, the Wickr festival's just a festival. Nobody's into human sacrifice, but there's almost any other thing you want if it doesn't hurt somebody else. There's dancing and drugs and conversations and costumes and art and wacky cars and vision-quests and girls on stilts, with a permanent techno soundtrack from dance floors in all directions. Wickr is essentially an alternate reality you live in for a week; it's a very cleansing experience. There just happens to be plenty of sex if you want it, and Mike and Di want it." "Are you and I having plenty of sex?" Pam wanted to know. "With each other. If we want it." She jabbed him with her elbow. "Not other people?" "Up to you, my love, but I'm not." "No, I'm good." She pulled her hand from beneath his and placed it on top. "We'll keep our magick to ourselves." There was silence for a while. "Anyway," Max said finally, "Wickr's like a free-thinker's Renaissance Faire that you get to live in." "So that brings up the question," Pam said, "of why two members of the FRC would choose it." "Two members having an affair," Max reminded her. "They've kept it quiet because they don't want their bosses to find out about it. Now comes a chance for a week of heavy petting, in a place their bosses would never go. As Di would be the first to say, 'Win-win!' " "Still, there will be fifty thousand people there, and both Mike and Di have been on TV a lot." "But how many of those fifty thousand, who like a little alternate reality in the desert, watched Meet the Press clips like us? Probably not too many. Plus, Mike and Di can disguise themselves." "With wigs and makeup, maybe," Pam responded with ironic dismissal. "W e can bend light to actually change what people see." "True, but we won't actually be dealing with them." "Right. Because then we'd have to sleep with them." "Yes, but also because the more I reveal of myself to the FRC, the more openings I give them to come after me. I prefer to remain invisible as long as I can, because soon enough I'll be right up in their face and I want every advantage I can get." " We can get." Pam rolled over in place onto her side, supporting her head with her hand. "So this is where Sly and Rosa come in." "Right." "Why them, particularly?" "They're both creatures of illusion." "And they're

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