Dark Rivers of the Heart

community.
        In this opulent wallow, the agency owned a handsome ten-story building on a desirable street near city hall. Bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and wine-swilling derelicts shared the sidewalks with mutual respect-except for those regrettable occasions when one of them suddenly snapped, screamed incoherent deprecations, and savagely stabbed one of his fellow Angelenos. The wielder of the knife (or gun or blunt instrument) frequently suffered delusions of persecution by extraterrestrials or the CIA and was more likely to be a derelict than a banker, or a politician, or a bureaucrat. just six months ago, however, a middle-aged banker had gone on a killing spree with two 9MM pistols. The incident had traumatized the entire society of downtown vagrants and had made them more wary of the unpredictable "suits" who shared the streets with them.
        The agency's building-clad in limestone, with acres of bronze windows as dark as any movie star's sunglasses-did not bear the agency's name. The people with whom Roy worked weren't glory seekers; they preferred to function in obscurity. Besides, the agency that employed them did not officially exist, was funded by the clandestine redirection of money from other bureaus that were under the control of the justice Department, and actually had no name itself.
        Over the main entrance, the street address gleamed in polished copper numbers. Under the numbers were four names and one ampersand, also in copper: CARVER, GUNMANN, GARROTE, & HEMLOCK.
        A passerby if he wondered about the building's occupant, might think it was a partnership of attorneys or accountants. If he made inquiries of the uniformed guard in the lobby, he would be told that the firm was an "international property-management company."
        Roy drove down a ramp to the underground parking facility. At the bottom of the ramp, the way was barred by a sturdy steel gate.
        He gained admittance neither by plucking a time-stamped ticket from an automatic dispenser nor by identifying himself to a guard in a booth.
        Instead, he stared directly into the lens of a high-definition video camera that was mounted on a post two feet from the side window of his car and waited to be recognized.
        The image of his face was transmitted to a windowless room in the basement. There, Roy knew, a guard at a display terminal watched as the computer dropped everything out of the image except the eyes, enlarged them without compromising the high resolution, scanned the striation and vessel patterns of the retinas, compared them with on-file retinal patterns, and acknowledged Roy as one of the select.
        The guard then pushed a button to raise the gate.
        The entire procedure could have been accomplished without the guard-if not for one contingency against which precautions had to be taken. An operative bent on penetrating the agency might have killed Roy, cut out his eyes, and held them up to the camera to be scanned.
        While the computer conceivably could have been deceived, a guard surely would have noticed this messy ruse.
        It was unlikely that anyone would go to such extremes to breach the agency's security. But not impossible. These days, sociopaths of singular viciousness were loose in the land.
        Roy drove into the subterranean garage. By the time he parked and got out of the car, the steel gate had clattered shut again. The dangers of Los Angeles, of democracy run amok, were locked out.
        His footsteps echoed off the concrete walls and the low ceiling, and he knew that the guard in the basement room could hear them too.
        The garage was under audio as well as video surveillance.
        Access to the high-security elevator was achieved by pressing his right thumb to the glass face of a print scanner. A camera above the lift doors gazed down at him, so the distant guard could prevent anyone from entering merely by placing a severed thumb to the glass.
        No matter how smart machines eventually became, human beings would always be needed. Sometimes that thought encouraged Roy. Sometimes it depressed him, though he wasn't sure why.
        He rode the elevator to the fourth floor, which was shared by Document Analysis, Substance Analysis, and Photo Analysis.
        In the Photo Analysis computer lab two young men and a middleaged woman were working at arcane tasks. They all smiled and said good morning, because Roy had