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narrow mouth the river was visible. Gideon thanked the young man and started working his way toward the river.
    He’d gone about a block when he heard automatic gunfire in the near distance. Hiding behind barrels and boxes in the narrow alleys that paralleled the main road, he made it to the river within ten minutes.
    Almost.
    Only a broad avenue separated him from the long wooden quay running along al‘€side the river. A jumble of boats was moored there, from tiny rowboats to large flat-bottomed river barges.
    Gideon paused behind a pile of rubbish.
    Three young men wearing turbans and carrying AK-47s lounged by one of the boats. This was not turban country. If someone wore one around here, it was because they were consciously adopting the uniform of their Middle Eastern confederates.

Gideon's War and Hard Target
    For the first time, Gideon glanced at the piece of paper....
    screaming monkey
    Screaming monkey? Before Gideon could think any more about it, bullets started slamming into the wall next to his head.
    CHAPTER NINE
    OMAR HAQQ WAS LATE for work. He hurried toward the helipad for Trojan Energy’s storage and logistics facility, which took up several square blocks of the industrial zone on the outskirts of Kota Mohan. Being a security officer here had once been considered a plum job. But over the past few months, several oil depots and processing plants in Mohan had been sabotaged by insurgents. At least a dozen of his colleagues had been killed, and twice as many wounded. Because of this, a day didn’t pass without some new security procedure being instituted.
    Before, company employees only had to show their badges at the facility’s main gate and that was the end of it. Now every badge was embedded with a microchip that only gave you access to those parts of the facility for which you were specifically cleared. People were always walking into the wrong areas and setting off the alarm. When that happened, Omar was supposed to run to the site of the breach with his gun drawn. No walking. He had to run. If you didn’t run, you were subject to a fine of at least five rupiahs.
    And now Omar’s heart sank when he saw his boss, Abdul Momat, standing at the counter of the security office by the chopper pad. He expected his boss to give him grief for being four minutes late. He would probably fine him for that, too. Oddly, his boss didn’t even seem to notice that Omar was late. In fact, he was surprisingly cheerful.
    “Biometrics!” Abdul said, smiling with paternal pride as Omar rushed to his station behind the security desk and logged on to his computer. “Biometrics will stop the terrorists.”
    “Biometrics,” Omar repeated, although he had no idea what the word meant.
    Abdul patted a wall-mounted panel beside the door to the helipad. In the center of the panel was a glass circle, like an unblinking eye. Next to the eye was a green button. Omar had never seen anything like it.
    “They installed it last night,” Omar’s boss said, brushing some invisible dust from the surface of the panel. “Starting today, we will be identifying every employee and visitor by scanning their retinas. Their biometric information will be digitized and stored. If the retinal scan doesn’t match? Boom!”
    Omar was not quite sure what a retina was, much less how you scanned one, but he smiled broadly anyway. “Excellent, sir!” he said. Omar always made a poke thingint of agreeing with whoever his boss was, and for the last year, it was Abdul Momat. Omar hoped to be the boss himself one day. He knew the only way to become a boss was to agree with everything your current boss said.
    “A lot of my people just complain,” Abdul said. “But you? You see the big picture.”
    “I try, sir.”
    Their conversation was cut short by the sound of a fist rapping impatiently against the counter. The man standing there was white, his face covered by a heavy but neatly trimmed beard. He wore a baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses.