The Firefly
Page 50
Gary smiled again. “Exactomundo,” he said. “Emphasis on that word living.”
“The Secret Service, looking after its own.”
“Ass,” Gary added. Swamp laughed.
“This is the Agency we’re talking about,” Swamp said as the cars accelerated down the on-ramp to the Capital Beltway. Westbound, he noted with some relief. “They’re not the goddamned KGB. I’ll admit that this was a pretty daring thing for them to attempt, much less pull off. But they’d never go so far as to put a hit on another government agent, right?”
“Right,” Gary said.
“Right,” Swamp echoed, nodding his head. The other two agents were nodding, too.
There was a five-minute silence in the car as they drove around the top of Washington, D.C., headed for the Cabin John Bridge. The Beltway traffic was its usual swirling mass of aggressively incompetent drivers. Then Swamp couldn’t stand it any longer. He turned to look Gary in the eye.
“Okay,” he said. “Was that or was that not Lucy I saw on that train?”
All three answered in perfect unison: “Yes.”
Swamp leaned back, exhaled, and closed his eyes.
Fireflies II
There are many species of firefly illuminating the common summer garden, and while their bioluminescent blinking appears to be completely random, it is not. Most of the blinks we see in the warm night are actually males in search of a mate, and each kind of firefly blinks out a specific code. The females watch. When they see the code of a male of their own species and it suits their purposes, they blink back the same code. The male then approaches for breeding.
Occasionally, though, the female has another need in mind—hunger. In this situation, the female will watch the night sky for a while, and she will see a male not of her own species blinking out his code as he searches for a mate. The female will then blink out the code of that alien firefly species, and when he approaches, she will kill him and eat him.
THE FIREFLY
Copyright © 2003 by P. T. Deutermann.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003008974
ISBN: 978-0-312-99481-5