The scoot crested the hill and the Emitter came into view, the building restored to the original Art Deco and lit from below. It was startlingly beautiful. Koizumi was standing, collar turned up against a weak rain, under the statue of astronomers out front, one of the last, few vestiges of what the place used to be.

What the place used to be was the Griffith Observatory. It fell into disrepair as light pollution and L.A.’s persistent cloud cover left it unusable. Fifteen years ago, the city sold the site to a group of advertisers, on the condition that they restore the building and maintain the exhibits — pendulum, Tesla coil — in the lobby. They agreed, tossed the telescope and installed a big diffusion laser. They paint the underside of the clouds now.

I parked and got out and Koizumi came over to meet me. No security, no Oaks. That wasn’t right. Yukio Koizumi should quite simply not be out in L.A., alone, at night. Robbing him would be profitable. Kidnapping him would be enormously profitable. Killing him would earn you mind-bogglingly lucrative pay-offs from every competitor he had, for the rest of your life, which would be about three weeks.

Maybe it was a trap, a sniper somewhere on the building waiting to clean up a mess. But then why not just off me in my apartment and be done with it?

Koizumi bowed slightly and said, “Please accept apologies for my outburst, Mr. Baxter. I am under enormous pressure.”

I pulled my collar up against the rain, too. It was slightly sticky. “Forget about it,” I said. “I never apologized for killing you.”

“That is correct. You did not.”

“Nope.”

“You don’t apologize for much, do you, Mr. Baxter?”

“Sorry about that,” I said.

Koizumi smiled, then raised a hand toward the Emitter and we walked together, up the side stairs and out onto the back balcony. The entire Los Angeles basin lay below, almost explosively bright, a churning sea of illumination. The city pulsed without dimming, the light a skin stretched tight over something moving beneath it.

Koizumi leaned his elbows against the top of the balcony wall and said, “Do you believe in God, Mr. Baxter?”

I laughed. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t. People in my line of work tend to take a dim view of anything that promises justice.”

He nodded and stared out at the view, his mind very far away. He looked older here, his hair damp and limp and the light cast by a cocaine ad overhead harsh and unpleasant.

“Do you?” I said. I didn’t quite know why.

He sighed, heavily, from somewhere deep. “Yes,” he said. His hands came up, palms open, to catch the raindrops for a few moments, then clasped together again. “Or, at least somebody is fucking with me.”

I shuffled my feet against the wet concrete, and let Koizumi think his thoughts. It was unsettling to see him in doubt, anywhere even remotely close to lost. Worse than out of control, even. At least then he was acting. He and his kind ran the world — the part of the world that worked, anyway — and empires and economies rose and fell on their say-so. Even a rumor of one of them standing in the rain, looking at a city view and mumbling about God could cause a regional recession. If Koizumi Extranational was in trouble, so were goodly portions of Los Angeles, Seattle, Honolulu and Osaka. I was in way over my head.

Somewhere out in the city, the green flare of an ATS missile stood out against the ocean of light.

“What am I doing here?” I said.

He straightened up and the blank, polite mask of professionalism descended. “I have instructions for you. We do not know where Danning is now, but the point is moot. Two weeks—”

“I’m still on the gig?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Baxter. If I did not make that point clear enough the last time we met, let me emphasize it again: you, and only you, must kill Roland Danning. Despite your incompe— inability to perform the task yesterday, you are still very much on the gig.

“Now, please. Allow me to finish.”

I gave him a hard look, then waved him on.

“Two weeks from yesterday,” he said, “on the eighteenth, Danning will be in a small office, on the fifth floor of a building on Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills.”

“Excuse me?”

“Two weeks from—”

“I heard you. I just don’t understand you. How do you know that?”

“I know it because I was told by my superiors.”

“And they know it how, exactly?”

“That,” he said, “I do not know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“You didn’t think to ask?”

Koizumi clasped his hands in front of him. “I do not ask questions, Mr. Baxter. I do as I am told. It is a virtue you might wish to study.”

I silently counted to ten, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. I should have brought an adrenaline suppressor.

“OK,” I said. “Sure. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Mr. Danning will be armed with a LV-426 pulse cannon and—”

“This time I do mean to interrupt. How the hell does he get a pulse cannon into Beverly Hills? They’ve been a no-fire zone since succession. You can’t get a bad attitude into Beverly Hills.”

“This I do know. It was left there for him when the building was assembled.”

“Excuse me?”

“Two years before the city broke away, the building was commissioned and the 426 was placed in an electromagnetically inert container, between support struts for an office on the fifth floor. When the walls were poured, the box was hidden. Post-secession weapons sweeps failed to find it.”

“The cannon was put there twelve years ago?”

“Yes.”

“This is another place where you didn’t see fit to ask questions, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“OK, then.”

“At 2:17pm, Danning will use the 426 to ambush a motorcade moving down Rodeo. He will succeed in killing his target, President Madhumalati.”

The rain filled the gaping silence with tiny pit-pats. The building suddenly vibrated beneath our feet as the Emitter clicked off and the dome rotated a few degrees. The laser sparked up again, and an ad for implant games came on.

“Um,” I said. “What?”

“Danning is going to kill the President of the United States, in thirteen days. Madhumalati will be in Beverly Hills attempting to negotiate the return of the city to the U.S. The first shot will kill her, so it is vitally important that you eliminate Danning before he takes it.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, having completely failed to notice the point when the world slipped out from under me. “Wait a fucking minute! What the hell are you talking about? Danning is going to kill the President? Roland Danning? He makes a good getaway, sure, but what the hell is he doing playing assassin?”

Koizumi sighed. “As I have said, Mr. Baxter, I have only limited information. I have been told only what you will need to complete your assignment. The location, the weapon, its age and condition, the target. And, now, the fact that Danning is an assassin, quite a good one. He was engineered that way, when he was in the military. He has been a sleeper for the past three decades, waiting to be called upon.”

“Jesus,” I said, and something cold crawled slowly across my spine. Danning wasn’t lucky to be alive. I was. Military assassins give people like me the same nightmares I give to normals. They’re what’s in the boogeyman’s closet.

“He is only partially sentient now, conditioned to respond to orders encoded in his implant. The opponents of my superiors have put him on this course, and he will not stop until it is done.”

“Or he’s killed.”

“Or he is killed.”

“What happens after he assassinates the President?”

“I do not know.”

“Who are the opponents of your superiors?”

“I do not know.”

“What the fuck is going on here?”

“I,” he said, “do not know.”

I threw my hands up in frustration. “Oh, come on!”

Koizumi unlatched his hands and spread them wide, palms up, surrendering. “I am sorry, Mr. Baxter.”