Three women and one man sat at a stained conference table in the middle of the room. Each of them had been handcuffed to a chair.

The male was maybe sixty years old, judging by his looks. Probably older, since he was a Fourth. He was white-haired, he was skinny, he was dark-complexioned… what he was not was Turk Findley.

The three women were of similar age. None of them looked like Sulean Moi. And certainly none of them was Lise Adams.

"Decoys," Weil said, his voice turgid with disgust.

"Find out who they are and what they know," Sigmund told the armed men waiting in the corridor.

Weil pulled Brian out after him. "Are you all right?"

"Just… yes," Brian managed. "I mean, I'm fine."

He wasn't fine. He was picturing the four prisoners with bullet-raddled skulls, washed up, perhaps, on some distant beach, or just buried in the desert, bodies shriveled under a layer of grit, paying the butcher's bill for their longevity.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

D'vali drove the car that took them north until nightfall, and in her less distracted moments Lise made a study of him.

He was—above all else—protective of the child, Isaac.

Lise and Turk had been hustled into a big utility vehicle, the kind with sprung-metal wheels that could cope with all kinds of terrain. The car had been built to accommodate six people comfortably but they had squeezed in seven: Lise and Turk, Diane, Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi—and Isaac.

Turk had advocated taking the Skyrex, but Dvali and Mrs. Rebka argued him out of it. An aircraft would be easier to trace and harder to hide than one land vehicle among many. They would use the plane as a diversion, Dr. Dvali said. Four of the compound's eldest Fourths, one of whom was a qualified pilot, volunteered to take it west. Probably they would be captured. But they knew what they were doing, Dr.

Dvali had insisted. They weren't afraid to die, if it came to that. One of the ironies of the Martian treatment was that it quelled the fear of death even as it extended life. Turk asked if they had a cure for the fear of insolvency.

So they drove away, and a dozen or so land vehicles left the compound after them, scattering in multiple directions on the available roads or across the raw desert. The compound had been rigged with explosives to keep it from falling into the hands of the authorities and to destroy any evidence that might lead to their eventual capture. Lise and company had been too far down the road to see the actual explosion, but at one point she had spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. She asked Dr. Dvali whether anyone might have been hurt—if DGS agents had arrived before the timed detonation, wouldn't they have been killed?