Chevy Chase, Maryland, January, 2078, Wednesday…

Sergio Battaglia was not a happy man. His informant at Quantico had just e-mailed one of his worker bees that in Vermont the FBI had discovered some data cubes that Sandy Clark had mailed to herself.

Perhaps copies of the ones Pezanowski gave me? Why do I have to depend on idiots? Obviously his incompetent associate's wet team had missed the data cubes in their search through the Clark house. He called Pezanowski and waited impatiently for the man to appear.

There was a time when he would have anticipated a screw-up and have an insurance policy in place. Now, as he nervously drummed his fingers on his desk, he was trying to come up with some plan for damage control.

I'm getting old. It's hard to juggle all that I used to juggle and keep on top of things. But retirement is not an option. Just as people had obligations to keep with him, he had obligations to keep with others. Many groups weaved their nets along the underbelly of the world. Some of these nets were so interwoven together that it was difficult to tell who was doing what to whom. So many people depended on Volodya Kalinin aka Sergio Battaglia that he wouldn't live twenty-four hours if he tried to walk away from it all. You could disappear from the ordinary world of men, but you could not disappear from the underbelly.