Angie Bricken, aka Mistress Julia, stared out the window and shivered. The storm was just about over, the rain no longer lashing down in torrents. She could hear the little streams on the slopes around her house roaring as they carried away the water. Across the valley, maybe seven miles distant, the lights of Mountaindale broke up the darkness. More lights every year, weekenders from the city were coming back now that the military proscription on the area had been lifted.

She felt cold, the whole house felt cold after the rain, and clammy. But she shivered as much from fear as from the damp. She could hide, or she could run again, but she knew she could never be free of the fear. That knowledge had been burned into her long before, on that March day in '44. That day, that terrible day, when Mark had texted her that message, she still recalled it in every detail, floating on her phonescreen.

"Lovergirl, get outta town. Now! Don't come back. Ever. I love you."

She hadn't wanted to believe. The bad days were over by then. There was a new Congress, and a popular President. But Mark knew too much. He'd hinted a few times that there were dangers out there. It went back to things he had done during the Emergency; "just doing my duty" he'd said. Just obeying orders. The same things that made him wake up screaming sometimes, or left him crying, alone, when he thought she couldn't hear him.

She pulled the throw tighter around her shoulders. She'd turned Mistress Julia off, she was just herself now, just plain Angie. She had no lights on, and was moving around with a little flashlight. The darkness was reassuring. Nobody knew she was here. Well, not quite, because she had put out a call to Old Jim.

Had to do that. He'd given her the false plates for the Nurida. And maybe he could help her get rid of that car too. She knew she could never use it again.

Again her thoughts flicked back almost twenty five years. She remembered it so well. She'd been out in the car, been shopping for groceries, checked her calls, stared at the message, looked out the window, stared at it again. It had been a sunny day, a spring day, a day of renewal and hope for the year, and then these twelve fatal words. How could this be happening? Her whole young world was crashing down.

She'd been twenty five years old and desperately in love. They were going to be married in a month's time. She had decided that being a soldier's wife would be just fine with her, especially since Mark had already done two tours of the middle east and wouldn't have to serve there again.

Again, she shivered. So long ago now. It was a lost world, another time, preserved only in her memories. And those, well they hurt, they made her ache inside.

She'd tried to call him. His numbers were disconnected. She'd refused to believe it and she'd dithered and she'd done the worst thing she could've done. She'd driven back to the apartment building, and she'd almost parked and gotten out of the car, but at the last moment she'd noticed the two men standing down the alleyway with their mirror shades and black track suits. They were waiting for her, and by a huge stroke of luck they didn't see her drive up becuse there was a delivery van doubleparked right there and when she slowed down she was hidden by it and they were watching the delivery guy wheel a big package up to the front door of the building. And in that instant she knew. Mark was dead and she was on their list, too. So she'd gone to the end of the block, turned right, turned left, drove into a strip mall parking lot and cried her eyes out. And she'd sent up a prayer for him, and marvelled that somehow, knowing what was coming, he'd found a way to warn her. Then, with iron settling into her soul, she'd driven out of the city. The only safe place she could think of was California. After the Hollywood Purge of '40, California had finally rebelled against the whole repressive apparatus of the Emergency. She drove across the country on the smaller roads, avoiding malls and chain restaurants, anywhere that would have lots of digicams. When she ran out of money in Kansas, she'd sold herself to a trucker at a roadstop for enough to keep going. Bad as that had been she knew it was way better than being captured. Eventually she'd made it to LA, found her friends Sanni and Jorje and established a new identity.

Those had been frantic, scary days. LA was full of fugitives like her. There was a booming industry that helped such people become someone else. There was even a slew of movies and virts about it, which aroused fury in the military and the more conservative parts of the country, but later those movies were credited with helping to bring the country back together. Otherwise, as was well known, California, Oregon and Washington State were going to secede and form their own country.

She'd managed to send a message to her sister, and after a while she'd learned that her parents had been taken into custody for a few days and released after many frantic phone calls to Senator Jones and Senator Lorsen. They were okay, though dad wouldn't talk about what'd happened and mom cried a lot. Angela could never go home again, that much was clear. Even communicating with her sister was very dangerous to everyone involved. So Angie stopped endangering Karen and gave up all connection to her family. It was the only safe choice.

And in time, Angie Bricken had morphed completely into Mistress Sara, Professional Dominatrix. She'd chosen that line of work because it was a cash business with few records and it seemed vastly preferable to straight prostitution. There were no pimps, there was no actual sex involved, and indeed the work was mostly a matter of attitude and mind games. Beside being blonde and pretty she was good at both and her clientele grew quickly. Jorje helped by designing a really slick website and Sanni helped too by writing copy for the site, screening clients and doing the books.

A couple of years later, being very careful about it, she'd tried to find out what had happened to Mark. She'd managed to reach a friend, who'd served with him in DC and who was no longer in the military. She'd learned that in the spring of '44 about three hundred officers had been secretly purged because they knew too much. The military's grip on things was slipping, normal politics was resuming and that would inevitably mean Congressional Investigations down the road. That meant potential witnesses had to vanish. Mark was one of them. The friend advised Angie to stay hidden. "They're never gonna let up on you.They find you, you're dead."

And that bleak truth remained.

Up here on the ridge, she was known as Julie Rider. She'd bought the house seven years back. It was a solidly built survivor from an earlier era, a farmhouse from the late 19th century. Abandoned during the proscription, it had been rehabbed by an artist exile from New York, Ned Loopiat, who'd sold it to her before moving to South America when the border was opened in '61.

It was virtually wilderness up here, and that was what she liked. With the death of the little towns during the military occupation the wild animals had reclaimed everything from here to the far side of the Catskills. Deer, wild pig, bear, coyotes, even wolves were common and there were persistent rumors about mountain lions. There'd never been that many people willing to live on the ridge, even in the 20th century when times were fat, but now, after the military occupation, there were just a handful like herself. Much of the time here she felt as if she were inhabiting her own universe, just her and the wild animals that she saw all the time.

There were people, though, and she did have friends up here, in particular Old Jim, who had a ramshackle place about half a mile farther up the ridge, that you reached via a completely broken stretch of road that'd gone back to jungle and been reclaimed by Jim and his friends with chain saws.

Jim was English, he still had a strong cockney accent, and she was sure he was a fugitive from some kind of organized crime. He'd let slip a few things over the years, usually when he'd had a drink or two. Jim was a man of many mysteries, but he knew everybody in the area and he could get you almost anything, if you asked nicely and were prepared to pay the going rate.

She turned away from the window. The beam from her flash picked out the plates where they sat on the dining table. What were the odds, she wondered, that two fugitives would end up living as neighbors on this lonely mountain?

She thought Jim had probably run off with a big chunk of money. Maybe from drugs, or immigrant smuggling, and he'd bribed his way into the US, probably came in over the Quebec border. A hefty bribe, some skilfull computer dazzle and he was in. Stuff like that happened often enough that Retired Border Guard was a synonym for a comfortable life and plenty of time on the golf course. To manage it twenty years back, though, was quite an accomplishment. Back then the borders were still locked down and it was very difficult to get into the country legally. So by getting into fortress America and hiding up here, Jim had disappeared off his former colleagues' radar screen altogether.

A brilliant stroke, that, and one that she wished she could emulate. But even if she'd somehow managed to get to Canada, she would never entirely remove her blip from the radar screen. They could get you anywhere in the world, anytime, all they needed was to find you.

Oh, she was the completely experienced fugitive, the cat who lived on the run. Covering her tracks, learning to hide, even in this age digi-cams everywhere, was the only reason she was still alive. Somewhere, on some computer system there was a file on her. It would only be erased when her death had been confirmed. Living with that knowledge had had its effect on her life. She'd never let any man get too close. Out in LA she'd had men that had wanted marriage, but she'd pushed them away. A normal life was out of the question. If she had kids they would grow up at risk too. It was a thing made of black and white, simple and brutal. That was how they thought, in complete absolutes. If it hadn't been for Senator Jones's strong intervention her parents would've disappeared, her sister and her sister's family too, most likely. Every loose end, everyone who had known Mark. His own family, his mom, his brothers, she assumed they'd all been taken. That was the way the thing worked.

So, she'd had ten years in LA. Then the third world crime rate finally got to her. Not personally, she was lucky that way, but her friend Dumpsy was shot dead in the street. Nobody ever figured out why. Then came the night when a stray bullet came in the window of the house she shared with Sanni and Jorje and hit Jorje's arm just above the elbow. Because it had come a long way, the cops said, it didn't shatter his arm, but it did rip out a chunk of flesh the size of a wine cork. Angie got a tourniquet around the arm while they waited for the ambulance. Jorje didn't die, but all three of them got soaked in blood and tears. It was the final blow.

So she'd moved to New York. It was the logical step, she'd decided, and a good market for her kind of services.

She'd had a little surgery to change the shape of her nose and her lower lip. Nothing dramatic, but enough to get past casual scrutiny. She arrived in Manhattan as Roberta Manley. She rented a tiny space in Greenwich Village and soon set up her business again. For that she bought a little studio on the Middle-West Side, put up her web-page in the usual way and began to build her clientele. Manhattan was always fertile ground for her line of work. Whether it was executives who knew they needed a good spanking, or just men that wanted to worship an anonymous female figure, it didn't take long for her to fill her books.

New York was so much safer than LA, too. Manhattan was a place where you could walk the streets at any hour of the day without fear. That was such a luxury after ten years of constant concern about crime and guns, she'd really enjoyed herself. And so she'd run her dungeon in Manhattan for almost another decade, moving now and then to obliterate any trail she might have left.

Then, one day she'd gone on a ride upstate with a client, Arthur Womack, who'd become a good friend, too, and she'd discovered the Hudson Valley and its beautiful countryside. The Proscription Zone was just opening up and she fell in love with the forest and the mountains. That broke the city's spell for her. She'd begun travelling upstate a lot and she bought her house on the ridgeline and began weekending there. Her friend, Arthur got a posting to Zurich for his bank. A year later she got an invitation to his "wedding" to a certain Heidi Westfal. He was changing his name to Westfal, too. Mistress Julia could read between the lines there. As far as she knew he was living happily in Sud-Zurich now and had taken Swiss nationality.

She had moved out of the city, changed her name a couple of times and re-established herself first in Westchester, and then across the river in Ramapo, where the taxes were a lot lower. Most recently she'd presented herself as Susan Cantridge and used a properly registered small company, Columnar Adjustments, to launder her income and pay taxes. She always used cut-outs and aliases and once in a while she would sit down with the computer and try and track herself down. So far she'd found her trails were all cold. Reassuring as that was she knew that government agencies had much more powerful means of search at their disposal.

Still, those who hunted her had never found her, not yet. So she felt she'd been doing something right all these years. Now, she was in the process of carefully purging her identity once again. Mistress Julia's web page was gone. Her clients had been informed that she had left town for an undetermined length of time. She was considering selling her little house in Ramapo and the business property. She had enough savings to sit up on the mountain for several years, if she was careful. Then again, she could explore the market for Domination and Submission in the Hudson Valley. Maybe she could become Mistress Rachel in Kingston, or Albany.

There remained the license plates. "Susan Cantridge" had driven that car into Sangacha's devo once a month. Having those plates on the car had given her a good cutout. But they were real plates and they could be traced and that could be bad for somebody.

So she had to talk to Jim.

Mr. Sangacha's killing had been an organized hit and that meant Sangacha had been some kind of important target. Which, of course, implied that there would be a thorough investigation. They were bound to run down that license plate, find it was bogus and try to locate its source.

She imagined a team of black clad Spec Forces crashing into some redneck house up in the hills. The screaming, the thud of the guns, the smashing of furniture and windows. The survivors being taken apart in some airconditioned facility with no windows. Questioned relentlessly until they'd surrendered every scrap of possible information. Then the lethal injections and the body bags, the quick trip to a crematorium and another successful disappearance.

Could the trail lead to Jim Rennie, though? That was, unfortunately, her biggest concern. One didn't like that level of demonstrable cold bloodedness, but that was what you were sometimes left with when you were a fugitive from shadowy, but deadly organs of the super-state.

That thought left her chilled and afraid. She wondered if she should get out now and just run for it. Go back to LA perhaps. Jorje and Sanni were still there, still had the nice house in the canyon. She could resume life there, even if there was nightly small arms fire and the constant threat of low life street crime.

There was a sudden rattle at the door, then a hard knock.

Jim? She whispered to the house to get her a visual on whoever was at the door, while she tiptoed across to the security phone console and touched the screen.

It lit up and she observed that she had a short, skinny visitor, wearing what looked like a jacket made of straw. Odds and ends poked out in all directions. Male, she decided, and she retreated back across the hall to the kitchen, where she took the gun out of the shelf of cookbooks. It was parked between French Recipes for Beginners-- which had a great Boeuf Bourguinon-- and Hot Wok Home. Angie had a tidy sort of mind and gun began with a "G."

It was no pissant little gun, either, but a DexMark .44 Special, with a soft-eez grip that contoured to her hand. It was loaded with bulldog hollow-points and she'd practised with it enough to be quite comfortable using it. Now, with the gun in both hands, trained on the door, she opened a link to the doorphone.

"Who is it?" she said.

"Got a message for Julie, she here?" said a voice, both young and male and she thought, a little frightened. She'd heard a lot of frightened male voices in her career. Just a litle frightened. It heightened their experience at her hands, made them come back for more.

"I'm Julie."

"Jim says, you're to come with me."

"Where?"

"Up to bivwak."

"Where's that?"

"Follow me. Hurry."

The youth had moved a few steps back from the door. She saw a thin faced boy of maybe fifteen. He was wearing a weird mix of high and low-end camouflage. She glimpsed fancy wading boots in mossy breakup, with what looked like a hooded sweatshirt decorated with enough twigs and small branches that in outline he looked like a bush.

"Is it muddy?"

"Damn right it is. Wear boots."

She checked with the house for an inventory of clothes and footwear. The house directed her to a pair of mud-green wellington boots. She found some dark grey sweatpants that'd been used for gardening and still showed the evidence. Up top she pulled on a black waterproof hoody. She hesitated over the gun, then shoved it back between French Recipes and Hot Wok. Jim was her friend. She put the plates in a little backpack and slung it over her shoulder.

Outside she found the kid waiting impatiently down the driveway. She switched the house back to auto-lock, keyed to her phoneline, then set off in his wake.

They went upslope, but not in the direction of Jim's house. Instead they slanted south west, skirting the high rock ledge and working through thickets of the bamboo that had run riot all over the Hudson Valley as the climate changed. It was hard going in the dark, and as her boots squelched in the muddy places and they waded across little streams, she was glad she'd thought to ask. Twenty minutes later they were in a big grove of oaks that she thought she knew from summer walks. They came to a deep gulley with a stream at the bottom throwing up spray and foam as it carried off the monsoon rainfall. To cross it they used a narrow bridge made of a couple of fallen trees lashed together with rope. On the other side the oaks continued and then she saw a yellow gleam of light, seemingly in the ground itself, which turned out to be a kind of cave, or shelter that fitted into the roots of several big trees, with a hollow space in which two more youngsters sat, both wearing similar camouflage systems to the one sent to fetch her. Both of these kids, however, were also wearing high tech equipment, including distant vision monoculars. There was something quite military about them, with wires and tech-boxes and little screens glowing like hot jewels that seemed to float around their heads on the ends of wires. The screens lit up their earnest young faces, grease paint, stubble, pimples and all.

"She's clean," said the nearest of this pair to the one that had brought her here.

"I knew that."

"That chopper went over again just after you left," said the other.

"Heading north?"

"Search pattern. It's still goin' on."

"What is all this?" Julia said.

"Dip," said the nearest of the monocular kids, "take her up. Sorry, lady, Jim's gone to full security mode, y'unnderstan'?"

A voice crackled out of the ether, "Kilo-foxtrot-delta, clear to approach."

Dip, the kid who'd brought her here, signalled her to follow. A blanket slid aside and they were in a narrow tunnel. Everything smelled of earth and mold. There were tiny red lights set in the ceiling.

Another blanket slid aside and they stepped out on the other side of a fold in the ground that supported those trees. Dip made his way up a narrow trail. Along the way she spotted another figure, another kid she felt sure, hiding off on the left side of the trail. She caught the outline of a rifle.

Dip had stopped beside another big tree. As she joined him, he looked up and then gestured up the tree.

She looked up and saw a dark mass about twenty feet up, in the middle of the biggest branches.

"Up there?"

"Yeah. Climb on the spikes." Dip shone a tiny red light on the tree's bark. She saw shining metal spikes projecting every foot or so in two rows.

Dip showed her how. It wasn't that hard, and she started up. At first it seemed easy, then she realized how high off the ground she was and she almost froze. What the fuck was she doing? She could get herself killed here.

Then she heard Jim's familiar cockney accent just above her head.

"Jools? C'mon up here. 'Fings are really gettin' weird tonight."

She kept going, did her utmost to resist the urge to look down and climbed right through a kind of trapdoor opening and up onto a platform built into the tree.

She was standing on a flat plastic base about ten feet long. There was a sort of tent or something at one end, and there were views for miles in all directions. Jim was sitting on a fold up chair. He had some massive binoculars in his hands and a tiny yellow light dangling on a wire a foot off his left shoulder. His big, slab-sided face cracked into a welcoming smile, acres of white teeth gleaming in the dark.

"Case you're wonderin', it's a top quality deer stand. Got it in Maine, special, like."

There was someone else up there with them, inside the hide. Another of these kids, she felt sure. There was a soft crackle of radio transmission from in there.

"What's going on?" she said quietly.

"Good question, that, Jools. Lotta activity tonight. Had a couple of military drones roll over the ridge a little while back. Then a chopper went north, came back south, ran low on fuel and went away. There's all sorts of stuff going on on mili-net. Robots, hunt and destroy teams, you name it."

"Robots?"

"Yeah, there's an 'aitch and dee team set up on Lalapa Mountain. We clocked them an hour back. They're transmitting in encryp', but they're using military channels. My boy Malcom, he's too good, y'know?"

Jim was nodding in the direction of the tent.

Angela was putting a few things together in her mind. Memories of hearing voices in the dark, and seeing a red light winking on and off in the woods above her house the previous month. Jim and his boys had been out here a lot then.

"Who are they, these kids? Dip and everyone."

"Dip?" Jim grinned. "That's Eric Kerath, abandoned kid, innee? Family moved to Ohio somewhere, left him behind. Oi took him in, gave 'im a 'ome, started trainin' 'im."

"Training?"

"Yeah. Most of the others are from the Pilkington family. Dad's in jail long term, mother's such a drunk she can't get outta bed most days."

"How many do you have?"

"'Bout a dozen, now. Some are better than others. These are the good 'uns."

"What are they training for?"

"The big one, the day when it all comes dahn."

"Sorry, what comes down?"

"You 'fink it's all over wiv' right?"

"Unnh, what's all over?"

"The milit'ry dictatorship, like. You 'fink that's all over an' done wiv'."

"It isn't?"

"Not yet. There's still some snake in that ol' bottle, darlin'."

She shivered, even though the southwest wind was warm. Jim had sources of information beyond her own understanding. How he had them, or even why, she couldn't fathom, but he seemed to know things that were inherently dangerous to know.

"Look, Jim, I have to tell you something." She pulled the backpack around, opened it and pulled out the plates.

"Got some trouble, then?"

"You could say that," briefly, she told him what had happened. With some editing. She had never discussed her business life with Jim and this didn't seem the occasion for that.

"Fuck me, that must've been a bit elevatin' for yer heart rate. Hid under the sink, didja? Inside the vanity, yeah? That's good, Jools, very good."

"Yeah, well, I'm still alive. But they must have recorded these plates."

"Right." Jim took the plates. "Don't worry about it, love. These ain't traceable nah."

"You're sure?" She felt she had to know this.

"Oh yeah. The car they were on is sitting out in the woods out back of my boy Charlie Bonsie's house, up Mombaccus way. Flash sort of unit, could be fixed up noice, but loaded wiv bloodstain, innit? Some aggravation dahn in New York, like."

"But it must be traceable?"

"They'll nevvuh find it, and besides, the ponce what owned it is dead, see?"

"Oh."

"Yeah, he was a right pillock, got himself offed over some money he owed. Didn't want to pay his bills, like. But they made him disappear, dropped him in the feedstream at a fish farm, so there's no body, no nuffink."

Angie began to relax a little. It sounded like the plates really would lead investigators absolutely nowhere.

"So, darlin', what are you gonna do?"

"I don't know, Jim. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I think it was some kind of corporate hit."

"Dangerous, that. Better you stay well out of it."

"Yeah."

"You'll be okay up 'ere." Jim grinned again. "Unless the snake gets outta the bottle, like."

Just as he said this, the kid inside the tent at the end of the platform stuck his head out.

"Jim, something's coming, big trace on the screen."

Jim was up in a flash. His weight shifting the whole plastic platform around. He went into the tent. Angie wondered how there was room, the structure just didn't seem big enough for him and anyone else. Then she heard a low, distinctive throbbing coming from the east.

Over the ridgeline, a mile or so to the south, she saw a cross of red lights rise up and approach at speed.

Jim emerged from the little shelter.

"Gunship!" he barked down into the woods below. "You got anyfing still turned on, get it off right now."

The throbbing built up, grew much stronger. The cross of red lights came swiftly across the trees, low, ominous. As it came closer it seemed to move faster and faster. For a moment, a mere fraction of a second, Angie caught a glimpse of an outline, something bulky and jagged, hunched and ugly, a 21st century predatory monster, and then it was gone, just red lights once more, heading roughly north by north west.

Jim had his binoculars up, was studying the thing. The heavy throb dopplering now, shifting away, diminishing quickly..

"Shark class, can't get the model. Big cunt, that's for sure."

Angie had long since gotten used to Jim's casual use of that word. It was an English thing.

"What's it doing?"

"Got me, darlin', I got no bleedin' idea."

"You've seen them before?"

"What, a Shark class? No, only in the guide. They're kind of big for domestic missions."

"Missions?" Angela felt frightened again. What was going on?'

A tiny voice seemed to materialize in the air between them.

"Heading 6439, NNW, Lalapa Mountain."

Jim reached up and pulled in a tiny wire mounted earpiece that had floated away from him.

"Got that. What's past Lalapa?"

"Uh, Woodstock?"

"Okay."

The cross of red lights was far away now, visible crossing the valley towards the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, a dozen miles north of their position.

"Yeah, they're still running missions, love. Question is what are they after up Woodstock way?"

Angie shivered. The predatory thing, startling in its blend of high end composities, carbon fiber, nu-steel and unusual alloys, was not hunting her, but just seeing it for that tiny moment had sent a chill right through her heart. Jim was right. There was still some of the old snake in that bottle.

"Past Lalapa now," murmured Jim, either to himself or to hidden listeners on his own network.

Like everyone else she was staring off towards the mountains, following the now tiny splash of red lights, when the flash came. Huge and bright, then small and very intense, down in a bowl of the mountains in the direction of Woodstock.

"Phew," said Jim, putting down the binoculars. "Fuckin' blindin' that was."

"What was that?" she heard herself say, and marvelled at how stupid she sounded. Fear could do that to you, she knew.

And then the thud and the boom came, small, hard and sharp, then flattening out, soon lost in the distance.

Jim had the binoculars up again. "Something's burnin', pretty good fire, I'd say." He looked up at her, suddenly gripped her hand hard.

"Missile strike, darlin', the snake is moving at last, the fuckin' ol' snake's still got some spit left in him."