CHARLES DANKO STOOD amid the bright lights outside the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and his body jittered with nerves and anticipation. This was his night. He was going to be famous, and so would his brother, William.

Anyone who thought they knew him would have been surprised he was speaking in San Francisco tonight. Jeffrey Stanzer had spent years in a secluded academic life, carefully avoiding the public eye. Hiding from the police.

But tonight he was going to do something far bolder than deliver some boring speech. All the theories and analyses didn't mean anything now. Tonight, he would rewrite history.

Every cop in San Francisco was looking for him, August Spies. And the laugh was, they were letting him in - right through the front door!

A chill cut through him. He clutched his briefcase tightly against his rumpled tuxedo. Inside was his speech, an analy-sis of the effect of invested foreign capital on the labor mar-kets of the Third World. His life's work, some might say. But what did anyone really know about him? Not a thing. Not even his name.

Up ahead, security agents dressed in tuxedos and gowns were poking through the pockets and purses of economists and ambassadors' wives, the kind of self-important, self-involved functionaries who flocked to this sort of thing.

I could kill all of them, he was thinking. And why not? They came to carve up the world, to put their economic thumb-print on those who could not compete, or even fight back. Bloodsuckers, he thought. Ugly, despicable human beings. Every-one here deserves to die. Just like Lightower and Bengosian.

The l............