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“What? Why?” Lars asked, stopping what he was doing. While Blake was rambling about Chinese control of the Canadian state, Lars had been rummaging around in his duffel bag, fishing out of it a radio of some sort.

“That,” said Blake. “Do not—don’t you dare.”

“This here is a C. Crane Skywave transceiver,” Lars said, proudly. “With a few soldering joints of my own, so it’s no reflection on the good people at C. Crane as to what this thing can or cannot do.” He raised one eyebrow and turned his head to Sano, saying, “But it can do a lot.”

“They’ll triangulate,” Blake said. “The moment you turn that thing on; they’ll triangulate and pinpoint our position.”

“Oh, come on, Blake!” Lars said. His exasperation surprised the teenagers. “First of all, I think ‘they’ already know exactly where we are. If we’re talking about Air Marshal Übermensch, he’s radioed-up himself. B, it would take some kind of wattage to do any real transmitting from where we are, but who knows what he has? Thirdly, uh…well I don’t know thirdly, but I do know that turning this thing on might help us figure what these lapels are.” He clicked it on while Blake glared.

The teenagers watched with awe while Lars fiddled with buttons and commands. He was, apparently, sweeping the frequency spectrum in each mode the radio had.

Umezawa was the most intrigued. “Wow, I’ve always wanted to get into the shortwave community.”

“Do you want to destroy your chances at a real social life? You’re too young to give up,” Lars said.

“There was a shortwave radio club when I was in high school,” Umezawa said. “I applied to join, but because I was already in juku, I decided to join the rugby club instead.”

“Balancing your life?”

“No girls to call me Blubber.”

“Ah,” said Lars, still fiddling with buttons and commands. “How were you, as a rugby player?”

“I was excellent at holding down one end of the bench,” Umezawa said. “The team also commended me for my rhyming cheers.”

“Funny,” said Lars. “I would tell you I was also good at holding down the bench, but I lettered in baseball when I was only a sophomore. I knew guys like you, though. You probably had more fun, to be honest.”

“Not during games,” said Umezawa. “To be a star, like Jason—that’s how Jason and I became friends.”

“He was in the same club?”

“No, his club played against our club. It was quite a rivalry: Kitashirakawa kids, pouring out of their yashiki palaces to play against us public high school kids.”

Jason was beaming. “We always won.”

“You always paid the referees more than we could afford.”

Jason’s eyes narrowed. “That was a one-time scandal, and the police cleared all our names.”

“Except your uncle, the equipment manager.”

“I thought you two were friends,” Lars said.

“We are,” they said.

Umezawa continued, “Jason is a great friend to me. He fell into me after getting tackled near the boundary lines. I was just finishing a chocolate bar, and my hands accidentally smeared his jersey with chocolate, so I had to take it home and launder it. When I went up to his ancestral yashiki palace in Kitashirakawa to deliver it, his guard dog bit me on the hand, and he showed me on Google maps where the nearest clinic was. In the meantime I had gotten blood on his jersey, so I took it with me to launder it again. So, yes, we are great friends.”

Lars and Blake exchanged glances again. Jason was beaming.

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“So you played rugby to get away from the girls,” Lars began, but he interrupted himself. “Ah! Aha! There we go! Listen to that! They had it tucked away in one corner of the spectrum, but there it is!” He turned up the volume. The grove bower filled with the sound of steady static and a very faint burble resembling the sound of old-fashioned phone modems.

“It needs amplification,” Blake said.

“Yep,” said Lars. “I’ll bet that jetliner has the amplifier in the cockpit somewhere, with noise filtration and whatnot. I'll bet this thing is designed exactly like you thought, Blake: the four of them are one thing. I wish we knew what it was.”

“What is it saying?” asked Umezawa.

“How should I know?” said Lars. “What am I? The Matrix? That little trickle of data transmission is encoded sixty times over. What do you make of it, Blake?”

“Thinking,” said Blake.

Lars turned to Sano again, with a smile. He said, “These lapels are an expensive piece of jewelry, don’t you think? They’re going to want these back.”

Sano hesitated before she answered, but she maintained her expressionless demeanor, a slight blush rising into her cheeks, saying, “It’s not something I would wear,” she said.

“Hm…” said Lars. “I’ll bet not.” He held his gaze on her. “I’ll bet not.”

Abe’s face flushed red for her. Why is he looking at her like that? Doesn’t he know she’s a teenager? He shouldn’t look at her like that. What are you talking about? I’m talking about an old man lusting after a teenager. How do you know that? Well, look at him! Look at his eyes! Oh, that could be anything; and who are you to be jealous? She doesn’t belong to you! You hold your tongue! Right, stoic. No one is even using a tongue right now. Mm…tongue…

“How are they powered? Battery?” Sano’s voice broke into the argument Stoic Abe was having with himself.

“That’s a pretty small battery,” Lars said. “Gotta be some nano parts in there to recharge it, or to create perpetual power somehow. Could be photoelectrical, but I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“Spying device,” Blake said.

“Huh?”

“Spying device,” Blake repeated. “Warehouses, research facilities, and other such. These things were paired with other snooping devices, or my name isn’t Blake Hunter. Places you can’t reach on foot, not without being seen.”

“James Bond stuff?” Umezawa said.

“Well, no,” said Blake. “Okay, yes, I think so. I was thinking more Cold War stuff, but, yeah, James Bond is a Cold War relic, isn’t he?”

“Pierce Brosnan is my favorite,” said Sano. “He’s so dreamy.”

“Remington Steele?” cried out Lars, still making fine adjustments on his transceiver. “Yuck!”

“These are the last in the chain, but they’ve got the codec in ROM for the satellite,” Blake said, to no one.

“Sean Connery or GTFO,” Abe said. “Absolutely defining performances.”

“You mean ‘uneven performances,’” said Jason.

“Probably wireless charging, as Lars said they were.”

“No one is a Daniel Craig fan?”

“Ewwww…” said Sano. “So many mommy issues. Who would want to go to bed with all that baggage?”

Abe flushed red again, and he could feel it, so he looked away before tears escaped. Is she already a spoiled rose? You have no right even to inquire, especially considering what you want to do to her. What? What do I want to do to her? I want to take care of her! You want no such thing, stoic.

“Daniel Craig is fine, probably better on balance than Sean Connery,” said Umezawa. “It’s just that he wasn’t defining.”

“A hidden satellite, or disguised, put up there with two transceivers, one for public consumption, another for corporate spying.”

“But I take your point,” Lars said, finally switching off his transceiver. “Pierce Brosnan was too short-lived in the role to have a proper chance for defining the role.”

“So dreamy,” said Sano. She sighed deeply.

“Count me as a David Niven man,” Blake said suddenly. The party gawked in wonder.

Finally, Lars spoke, “David Niven was never a James Bond.”

“Who’s David Niven?” Umezawa asked.

“He drinks champagne a lot,” said Abe. “And I think he blew up a bridge or something.”

“Who’s David Niven?” Blake said. “Only the greatest actor, raconteur, soldier, and all around mensch a man could ever dream to be. If he were alive today, I’d have no doubt he’d be our nemesis in employ to do us in, wandering around in this mountain wilderness without a thought to survival. He just survives.”

Abe took note. An actor and a soldier? A womanizer? Now there’s a stoic for you, stoic!

“But he was never a James Bond!” Lars insisted.

“Au contraire, mon amis,” Blake said, putting on airs. “He starred in the 1967 interpretation of Casino Royale, which was not an Eon Films production. It’s great.”

“Interpretation?” Lars whistled. “Wooo-eee! That’s what James Bond does to a man, all of a sudden-like. Makes him switch from coffee to tea.”

“I still don’t know who David Niven is,” Umezawa said.

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“Lars is right,” said Blake. “They’re going to want this back.”

“Why can’t they just make another one?” Sano asked.

“Part of a set, all hard-encoded to each other. Probably cost a pretty bundle to get it all in motion. Plus the training. Small group operation. Starting to make sense that someone with a larger organization could take the risk in blowing up that commercial airliner. Layers of internal bureaucracy, like a state, where one hand doesn’t know what the other eleven hands are doing, spread all over Kingdom Come: Israel, Norway, UK, Manhattan, who knows? ‘Who did this?’ the government blowhards will ask, thinking they’re pulling the strings, all the while their corporate masters will shrug in feigned ignorance, sending over subpoenaed documents by the tens of thousands of pages, with a nugget buried here, and a nugget buried there, for some House intern to discover to make a name for herself and get on TV, and in twenty-five years, when it doesn’t matter anymore, the corporation will deliver up the ‘terrorists’ who did this, just like they did for Lockerbie.”

“Well, Blake,” Lars said. “That’s a mouthful to consider.”

“It’s all there,” Blake said. “All you have to do is see it.”

“Uh huh,” said Lars.

“The conspiracy runs pretty deep,” Jason said.

“It is getting deep in here, isn’t it?” Lars said. Everyone laughed, except Blake. “Look, Blake, I have no doubt you’re right. You’re always right about these things, in your own way. I don’t understand how knowing all this gets us off this mountain with any hope to survive. We don’t even know who our enemy is.”

“Well, we’ve got the dingus,” Blake said. “That gives us a little leverage. And we have numbers to defend it, and guns.”

“I’m saying it don’t matter!” Lars said excitedly. “We have the dungus, we don’t have the dungus. They still do us in. We stay up here, they hunt us. We go down there, the TV lets them know exactly who and where we are. Don’t you think about these things?”

Blake sighed and looked at the teenagers. “Lars is right.” He looked around at their wooded bower. “We have to keep moving, though,” he said. “We have to come up with a plan that loses Air Marshal Übermensch.”

“We basically know that Abe can command the trees, so we’ll always have safety and shelter,” Jason said.

“By magic,” Lars said.

“Technology,” said Blake, “Or I’m a monkey’s…how did you put it?”

“Or you’re a monkey’s ugly ex-wife’s baby by her new gorilla.”

“Technology,” said Blake. “Either way, we seem to be secreted in here. Whatever technology it is that Abe is using—well, it confuses whoever it is looking for us, and we can rest here at least for a little while, safe.”

Just then, a knock came, as though at a door.

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