Quatrain 28, Century 3. ""Tainted streams flow into fields of stone / As the vanguard rises from hope / On the path of least obstruction / The evil one is crowned.""

An operative for the Raven Nation, Alana MacAfee, disappeared while investigating an anonymous posting to the Web site. It claimed that the aliens were active in the small mining town of Hope, Montana. Could've been the ""hope"" mentioned in the quatrain. Always wanted to see Big Sky country.

Alana was one of Jordan's soldiers, so she was taking this personally. We decided to make the infiltration a team effort. Jordan set off to check out a local motel, questioned the clerk there, a woman named Sheryl Nelson. Told Sheryl we were a couple and were supposed to be hooking up with Alana to drive to Bozeman together later that day.

Sheryl told us Alana had already checked out.

Jordan was antsy, hadn't heard from Alana in three days but knew her agent had been onto something when they last talked. I told her how a cop had tailed me

A faction of Gua generals, working with Joshua, seek Foster's help in a plot to assasinate Mabus.

----- The prophet Nostradamus has foretold the arrival of an alien antichrist who will bring about the apocalypse. He calls himself Mabus, and he's out there right now ... somewhere. The prophecies of Nostradamus guide us and help us fight the Gua, but we have yet to get close to Mabus, we have yet to strike a blow that will stop the impending invasion. Until then, we prepare.

Call it a crisis of faith. Eddie was desperately searching the quatrains, trying to get us closer to Mabus but we were running out of angles. Jordan tried to bolster my spirits - told me our plan was working. We would continue to take the Gua down one by one, each step bringing us closer to finding the Guahead. Jordan believed we were gonna get him and win the war.

While sifting through quatrains, Eddie received an encrypted message from Joshua requesting a meeting to discuss Mabus. He wanted me to come alone. Eddi

Quatrain 41, Century 4. ""At the inception of the millennium / machines of the new age deliver devastation in war. / From a throne under 13 faceless warriors / the invader king wields power.""

""Inception OS"" is an operating system used by almost every computer in the country — ""the machines of the new age."" Max Stareman is president of the software empire who planned to release the program to a massive media and consumer blitz. If Inception software was the weapon that ""delivered devastation"" then we had to stop it.

And first we had to get to Max Stareman.

Eddie figured tapping into Stareman's home base computer qualified him as nuts and who was I to argue — Eddie'd always called himself ""crazy,"" my plan helped validate the name. Way I saw it, the world's top computer programmers worked for Stareman, and any one of them could've been Gua — even the billionaire himself.

Wondered what the Gua wanted with an operating system anyway? Eddie figured the answer was easy: control. Most of the wo