Copyright 1998. All rights reserved.

Paolo’s hands didn’t shake, although his breathing was a bit staccato. Jesus, it hurt him to damage people like that! Even when they were faceless strangers. Even when they deserved it.

Paolo stepped away from his desk. He ran his fingers over the luxurious leather of his executive chair, and left the room. How many people had he just sabotaged? How many had he driven into bankruptcy and abject poverty? He would never know.

He needed some air. A chance to walk around, collect his thoughts. He would risk a trip into Sofia’s garden, a lush land of fragrant delight and hidden danger.

He could see a swatch of the garden from the two-story-high window through which sunshine coursed into the stair well. As with all things within Sofia’s purview, the original garden plot adjoining the house had been transformed. Repeatedly.

When they arrived, the garden had held some simple flower beds. The parcel had been reclaimed from the jungle, tamed and domesticated.

Sofia had transformed the area back into a jungle, a place where dense green vines wrapped and twisted around the seemingly random clusters of bushes and aromatic flowers. A Spaniard arriving centuries before would have felt right at home on first glance—just another chunk of the Yucatan to hack through.

But upon closer inspection, he would have been puzzled. Perhaps he would have dropped to his knees to ask God about Satan’s dark purpose. For the plants now bursting from the garden did not normally grow in the Yucatan. Here, these nonnative plants demanded unrelenting, intensive care to thrive in their carefully crafted, chaotically overgrown state.

Paolo stepped down from the staircase, around the corner through the kitchen, and out onto the short path that led into the garden. A tall bower laced with antique roses invited him to enter, at his own risk. He hesitated but a moment before plunging ahead.

The sound of burbling water drew him deeper into the hidden mysteries of Sofia’s special place. Scores of vines and branches reached with delicate fingers into the path. Paolo winced as an errant rose branch reached out to strike, its thorns raking his arm just above the elbow. Tiny beads of crimson welled up along the scratch, a bright string of rubies glittering in the sunshine. Paolo cursed softly.

A sweet and innocent voice, surely the voice of Eve or one of her descendants (although it could have easily been the snake), floated to him from a distance. "Is that you, darling?" Sofia asked with dulcet charm.

"Sweetest Sofia," he responded with a voice of delicate happiness, while considering how best to saturation-bomb this place with napalm, "You have made this land of quiet splendor not only as beautiful as a jungle, but as dangerous as one, too."

Through the ivy vines of the central walkway, Paolo caught a peek of beautiful female curves gliding around a Banyan tree. A few seconds later, behind him he heard a voice gasp. "You’re hurt," Sofia said. She leapt catlike across the treacherous flowering almond bushes separating them. "Let me fix that for you." She cocked her head, studied the scratch, and delicately kissed it.

Paolo grunted his thanks.

Sofia looked up into his eyes, and as her gentle smile curved into a wicked grin, she bent her head and licked the blood from his arm with long, graceful movements of her tongue.

Paolo shuddered at the touch. "Ooof," he said, with the characteristic power of the male wit. He took a step back, thus nearly impaling himself on the rose bush once again. He was trapped like Adam, he realized, in a garden, between an alluring woman and a deadly danger. He too understood full well that the alluring woman was actually the more dangerous one. Nonetheless, like Adam, he stepped back toward the woman, on the verge of accepting the greater dangers presented by the female of the species. Then he remembered why he had come into the garden in the first place.

Sofia recognized the change in his expression with practiced ease. "Uh oh," she said teasingly, "I can see you’re in no mood for teasing." She put her hands on her hips. "What terrible thing has happened?" She raised an eyebrow as her analysis of his somber mood yielded subtler nuances, leading her to correct herself, "Or rather, what terrible thing did you have to do?"

Paolo laughed with a touch of bitterness. "Ah, Sofia, I could never hide my thoughts from you." Well, sometimes he could hide them, mostly by accident. Periodically Sofia was so alert for his feelings and thoughts that she jumped at shadows, certain he was melancholy or irritated when he was perfectly fine. But today she was right on target. He took a deep breath; the perfume of Sofia’s jungle garden undercut his depression. "I just shook down the tailriders," he explained.

Sofia looked at him in puzzlement.

"I created a set of trackable identities, to lure the scam artists to follow me, so I could sucker them on a bad forecast. The bad forecast—and it was a beauty, I must say—hung a hundred or so people out to dry."

Sofia closed one eye and wrinkled her nose. "You did this once before, didn’t you, darling?"

Paolo nodded. "About six years ago. I never expected to do it again, but after Reggie left, I realized his article would spawn a whole new generation of gamers trying to get a free ride." He threw his hands in the air, slapped them down on his thighs. "I hate knocking people down like that, even if they ask for it."

She stepped up and wrapped her arms around him, laying her head on his chest. She had been covered with dirt from the plants; now he was too. "If it bothers you that much, why not just let them go ahead? We have enough money, let them be."

Paolo ran his hand through her hair. "If it was just the money, you’d be right, I’d just let them be. But tailriders have a more terrible effect than that. They distort the odds on the ‘castpoint. Remember the mess I told you about for the Gate location?" He rocked Sofia gently in his arms. "If any tailriders were able to get a handle on my brand during the assault, they’d back my forecasts with more money, more strength, than the forecasts warranted." He shook his head. "In the normal course of events, those people would eventually lose their shirts. But there are too many life or death decisions in the next two weeks to let time and statistics teach the tailriders a lesson. Right now, the ‘castpoints have to reflect mankind’s best judgment."

Sofia squirmed restlessly in his arms. "Ah, yes, darling, I seem to recall this part of the conversation from the last time." She stood on tiptoes and breathed in his ear. "Let me see if I can get this straight. These tailriders, the scam artists that you just scammed, could lead Earth Defense to make the wrong decisions, so the Angels would get killed, Shiva would get to Earth, and cities would get vaporized. Is that correct?"

"Pretty much." It always surprised Paolo when Sofia revealed how well she understood the Web and its machinery. Her grasp of the features of electronic commerce seemed incongruous and inappropriate.

"Well, then, congratulations, darling, on having saved ten billion or so lives this morning. What are you going to do this afternoon?"

"Hmph." He knew she was right, but he still wasn’t happy with it.

Sofia’s eyes gleamed; once again, Paolo knew he was in trouble. "Come here," she commanded, taking his hand and leading him around a corner. They crossed an intersection, bore left at a fork, and found a bench under the shade of a pair of Golden Chain trees. Paolo looked around wonderingly; he was completely lost. "This garden is only fifteen meters square, isn’t it?" If necessary, he could just pick a direction, force his way through the plush growth, and come out into the open. He looked at the rose bushes and the bougainvillea, and realized that the plan was untenable. Only Sofia could lead him out of here. He was completely at her mercy. No doubt she had designed it that way.

"Paolo, you see the garden from the air every day. Does it look any larger than fifteen meters? Of course not."

Paolo shook his head. "This maze is more complicated than the corridors in Shiva," he muttered.

"See how fortunate you are that I’m on your side?" she answered his unspoken thoughts. On tiptoe again, she rubbed her nose along the line of his chin. "There’s a price to be paid, though, for safe passage. Quid pro quo." She purred.

Paolo laughed, lifted Sofia from her feet, and flung her gently but masterfully upon the bench.

Sofia yelled, "Wooohooo!" as she put her arms around him in response.

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