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Page 26.

Rick understood the score. Most people didn't see it, but the world was spinning into a war between large corporations and their owners, to controlled all the wealth and money. It wasn't about nations anymore. It was about a new global order in which wars were fought with lawyers, and corporations were becoming more powerful than nation-states. By PAX she meant the Popular Alliance, a group of intellectuals and union activists trying to turn the clock back to the vanishing notion of popular democracies. The opposition were CEOC, for Corporate Executive Officers' Confederacy. It meant a growing alliance of convenience by oligarchs in various nations, like Wan, without any sense of national belonging or obligation. They increasingly owned and operated the world. All else was pretense by now, including sham democratic voting, while the propaganda grew more shrill than ever. Sheep believed all the lies, which were usually couched in the lingo of faux patriotism or religion.

"I had a friend in Shanghai," Hannah continued, "named Mélusine, from Luxembourg. Doesn't wear a bag over her head to prove she is men's obedient property. She's married to a nice Catholic boy from Luxembourg. That's where she lives now. They both teach at the university in the capital city. Mélusine taught me a lot about the world that I didn't realize. Like how my mom would have lived if we were anyplace else in the industrialized world except the U.S., which never had universal health care. We are the only place where they kill you if you don't have cash-and-carry for medical care, or as I call it Medieval Care; the most expensive so-called care in the world, and you still get nothing for it. Well, anyway." She sighed deeply and tearfully, thinking of her mother and her lost property now owned by the health denial industry's banks and so-called insurance jokes.

She took a break from her bitterness to chew the excellent jambon et fromage on a pain normal, just ordinary French bread that Rick found wild, chewy, and wonderful.

She continued, "Once I ran off with the McGuffin, I made the mistake of contacting PAX through this creature Fincoff. I thought I could trust him because Mélusine gave me his name originally as a contact in Paris. He supposedly was teaching at the Sorbonne for a time. Actually, they never heard of him. So much for trusting people. By then it was too late. By contacting him I contacted PAX but come to find out—too late—he got in touch with CEOC and offered to sell the McGuffin back to Wan for a million Euros."

Rick began to see the light. "Don't tell me. The hand-off was supposed to happen at the Bar-39."

She gave him a wry look. "Yeah. And you walked into the middle of it."

"I should have kept walking."

"What's done is done," she said. "Fincoff was sort of naïve. He didn't realize what an evil person Wan is. There was no way Wan was going to hand him a fortune in return for the McGuffin. When Fincoff was in the bar—I was watching; I saw you; I saw the whole thing go down—Wan's two goons tried to slip a knock-out drug into Fincoff's beer."

"Ah," Rick said. "That is why he switched drinks with me."

She nodded. "And why you were loaded to the gills. They wanted to drug Fincoff, take him into the alley, get the McGuffin from him, and leave him there."

"Instead," Rick said, "Fincoff let me take the drugs. He knew he was getting screwed, so he tried to duck out another door."

"Yes," she said, "but they caught him in the alley. They tried to get the package from him, but of course he didn't have it—I did. I didn't even have it with me."

"Who's they?"

"Yolo is the big Nigerian guy. Savia is Cuban. They are some of the goons who work for Yoichi, who is Wan's chief executioner at the moment."

"At the moment?" Rick echoed.

"Yeah. People like Wan change their favorites the way you change your underwear—hopefully from day to day in your case."

Rick found it humorous but did not laugh. Neither did she.

"Like he was getting ready to sell me to the next customer," she said. "I knew he was tired of me. When my mother died, I wanted to kill him. I hated myself for becoming a whore. I hated myself for selling myself to the corporations. With all their lies, I still had no guarantee of a payout at the end. No five year deal, pension, nothing. I just wanted to save my mom, and when they let her die to save a few dollars, I hated them, him, and everyone connected with health denial, laughingly called health insurance. No other country on earth has a corrupt system like that—"

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