One American National Airways Dock One, Manhattan Airship Harbor New York City September 1st, 1916(b) Point of departure plus Four Years I''ve never flown before, Senior Field Operative Luz O''Malley Ar--stegui thought. She looked up at the docked airship, a study in light and shadow beneath the glare of the hangar''s banks of lights, silver-bright above and reflected off the rippling water of the berth below. And my first trip . three thousand miles over an ocean, to a continent at war! At seven hundred fifty feet from nose to tail and a hundred forty across at its broadest point, the great silvery whale-shape of the San Juan Hill was the pride of American National Airways-four months out of the yard at Lakehurst and with its three sisters the only dirigibles in the world capable of routine transatlantic trips. The Battle class were a leap even for the brilliant, daring young engineering wizards of the National Aeronautical Administration, with a more advanced teardrop shape than any zeppelin and bigger too, larger even than the one that had spent a hundred hours in the air recently to reach German East Africa from Bulgaria despite the Entente air patrols. And fortunately not one of their occasional brilliant daring failures, like that six-engine flying boat that kept crashing and sinking, or bursting into flames . and then crashing and sinking. The airship above her was so large that its floating over the water seemed utterly unnatural, as if the giant silvery-gray thing were in an eternal mid-fall ready to topple down on you .

though it was also a fragile lacework of aluminum covered in fabric, when you thought of Atlantic storms. The interior was vast, millions of square feet, but most of that was bags full of hydrogen and gas fuel for the ten engine pods. She couldn''t tell if the stirring she felt and the shiver on the back of her neck was excitement or apprehension. Not fear, certainly not that. Luz inhaled deeply; that smell of brackish harbor water, fuel oil, lubricants, and the doped cotton covering the giant flying machine was a new thing in the world. A coughing roar sounded as the engines began to turn over; the four-bladed aluminum propellers started to spin and the breeze of them went washing over her and tugging at her hat and skirt and fluttering cool fingers into her hair. Excitement, verdad. Fear I leave for others .

I left it behind with my childhood. Luz wasn''t afraid of much; she had never been timid, and what remained had been scoured out the night Pancho Villa''s men burned the hacienda where her family had been staying, back before the Intervention. Her face changed as she remembered, and for a moment her midnight-blue eyes might have been black, as the lighter streaks around the iris vanished. Remembered waiting in the back of the wardrobe in the dark, with the muzzle of the pistol pressed under her chin. Listening to the Villistas kill her parents while she swallowed her sobs, then crawling out on her belly like a snake below the worst of the smoke, past their machete-hacked bodies and through the sticky pools of their blood. Five years ago now . "Miss?" the ticketing officer behind the counter of his kiosk said, alarm in his voice and a startled look in his eyes at what he''d seen in hers. "Sorry," she said, blinking back to reality.

The stabs of uncontrollable memory were rare now. Now that every man involved was dead, including Villa. She''d watched most of them die, the ones she hadn''t killed herself. The agent was still puzzled by what he''d seen, frightened without knowing why. She gave him a charming smile as she handed over her passport along with the ticket. The passport was forged in the name of one Elisa Carmody de Soto-Dominguez; there were more formalities to travel these days, what with the war, but the Black Chamber''s documents section was on the job. Mexicans who wanted to travel abroad also had to get U.S.

passports to do it, but that and the requisite dual citizenship were fairly easy to acquire for wealthy ones in good odor with the American authorities who ran the Mexican Protectorate now. Elisa had been one such, until the Chamber found out she was also a secret member of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario and conspiring with the German Empire against the United States. While Luz traveled under her name, the luckless actual Elisa was either dead of what the file would say was heart failure-a .45 slug in the back of the head did make your heart fail very badly indeed-or still undergoing a series of exquisitely unpleasant experiences in El Palacio Negro de Lecumberri. The Black Palace of Lecumberri was a hulking ill-omened pile northeast of Mexico City that had been built as a prison by President Porfirio D''az back around the turn of the century, and one that made her skin crawl every time she came near. It had been the sort of place where you went for offending one of The Indispensible One''s jefes pol''ticos and slept tied upright to the walls because there were five thousand inmates in cells theoretically designed for seven hundred fifty. And there you stayed until you died or some guard made fifty pesos under the table by selling you to a labor agent from the tobacco estates of the Valle Nacional, which was about the same thing with fresh air. It was still a prison for the Protectorate today, though much more select in its client list.

It also housed the Black Chamber''s southern headquarters, a Federal Bureau of Security station, and representatives from what she thought of as the Heinz 57 Varieties of military intelligence. The ticket agent visibly relaxed under the beacon of her smile, dismissing the unguarded emotion he''d just seen in her eyes. Charming smiles were something Luz did well, along with other, hidden talents. She was in her mid-twenties, with straight fine hair the color of raven feathers, so black that it had metallic-blue highlights in the sun. It was done in the bobbed style the French actress Polaire had recently made fashionable among the daring, and framed a comely straight-nosed, full-lipped, olive-skinned oval face with high cheekbones under a round turban-style hat with a single peacock plume and a scarflike silk fall that was looped under the chin and fastened on the other side with a silver clasp. Her clothes were modish but a little more conservative than the bobbed hair, a dark maroon tailleur outfit of jacket and lower-calf-length skirt of light worsted suited to the humid heat of New York''s summer, with a cream silk shirtwaist and a few small pieces of day jewelry in the popular southwestern style. She''d picked those up in Santa Fe while debriefing from her last mission in a Black Chamber safe house. Being obviously a bit of a dashing New Woman of the era of the New Nationalism was one thing, but she didn''t want to stand out as a full-scale flapper with a cigarette in an ivory holder and a whiskey flask tucked into her garter.

That would be bad tradecraft, both because it would attract attention and because it would be another layer of pretense she''d have to keep track of. It was much easier to disguise who you were than what you were. Like most of her generation and class Luz regarded the old Victorian conventions of Mrs. Grundy and her ilk with a degree of amused contempt and enjoyed herself without qualms, but she wasn''t basically a frivolous person. Thank God the corset is dead, though, she thought. My luck! She''d just barely missed the period when you were a hopeless eccentric or a free-love advocate in odd-looking William Morris-style aesthetic gowns if you didn''t start corseting by your late teens. The change had been very swift. Nobody her age wore one now, except dowdy lower-middle-class provincials who hadn''t gotten the news or a few pinch-mouthed conservatives in enclaves like Beacon Hill in Boston where they tried to pretend the twentieth century hadn''t started yet.

And thank God that looking active is fashionable now, too, everyone living Uncle Teddy''s "Strenuous Life" or pretending to. Her honorary uncle approved of strenuous women, too. Luz knew he meant it because she''d visited the Roosevelts often since girlhood; her father had been a Rough Rider and, as an MIT man who made his living as a consulting engineer in wild and woolly places, was just the type of scientific modern buccaneer the president admired. I''d have been out of luck in the era of the tight-laced swoon and interesting pallor. The middle-aged man in the blue uniform behind the booking booth''s counter concealed any annoyance at her carefully calculated last-minute arrival and looked at the baggage the sweating porter had piled up behind her with his dolly. There were two expensive Vuitton steamer trunks in yellow leather with brass corners to go into the hold, and a large ostrich-hide suitcase and a hatbox by the same maker for the eighty-odd hours of the journey. They were plainly visible, since an airship boarding process wasn''t the mob scene you''d get at Grand Central or Penn Station, especially when you were the last passenger to arrive. In fact there were several hundred people in the hangar, but they were mostly ground crew lost in the hugeness of it, disconnecting the lift gas and fuel gas and ballast water pipes and electric power cables and standing by the mooring lines.

None of them were paying her any special attention, except the corporal in charge of the very bored but reasonably alert Federal Bureau of Security squad in their new turtlelike steel helmets, baggy olive-dust-b.