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NICK BALL LIVED in a world of listening devices and electronic gadgets. Telephone bugs, room transmitters, and tracking devices. Recorders, decoders, and voice changers. RF, UHF, and microwave transmissions. Hardwired, miniaturized, and long-range cameras. He fed on hi-tech fantasies. Thrived on adrenaline rushes. Relished getting inside people’s ugliest thoughts and discovering their darkest secrets. And pinned his ambitions on the big score, the brilliant swindle, or the windfall opportunity dropping out of the sky. His were unseen handicaps and hidden addictions.

He took the off-ramp and waited for the traffic signal to change. In the reflection of the rearview mirror, he saw what he had become, a man abused by whiskey nights and nicotine days. His scowling lips hadn’t laughed for months. His milky eyes mirrored more treachery and artifice than any scoundrel of eighty-six confined to a broken wheelchair. Religion gave up on him years ago. His father gave up on him when he turned sixteen. His mother never cared what the middle child of her five sons was up to. He was a sorry excuse for a man. He had known it for quite some time. He just didn’t want to face the truth. The decisions he made over a lifetime of duplicity had changed him. But he kept on doing what he was doing. Trespassing into other people’s lives. Altering destinies. Putting wrinkles into tissue-paper faiths. Trouble was, he could do it in his sleep.

A year ago, he decided to opt out. The decision sneaked up on him by degrees, like mercury rising in a thermometer over months and years until finally the glass shattered. He despised every one of his aliases, each an exact replica of himself, shallow and self-indulgent, even if they went by different names and were born under different signs of the zodiac. When this latest opportunity came along, he didn’t hesitate taking the job. He acted first and considered the consequences later. Impulsive decisions had always gotten him by. His latest was about to catch up with him. There was no undoing his involvement. He had put himself in a tight box. The dimensions were roughly the size of a pine coffin.

Brenda met him at the front door, arms crossed and mouth stern. She was in a foul mood. She had been in a foul mood for ten years. They owned a bungalow on the north side of Chicago. It needed a rehab, something they often talked about the way husbands and wives often do but put off just as often. They met in grammar school, became sweethearts in high school, went their separate ways after graduation, and came together a third fatal time. They never should have gotten married or made babies together. A real family needed loving parents, certainly not reluctant inmates forced to sleep under the same roof because of vows and obligations. The boys were different. They ran to him, hugging his legs and crying out, “Daddy, Daddy!” It was exactly what he needed. Since it would be his last such welcoming home, he might as well savor it. Brenda stood back and watched, her manner detached, her expression sour. He visualized the carefree girl in fourth-period history class, her silken hair parted down the middle and framing a pretty face that was always merry. That girl was gone.

“How’s he doing?” he asked, patting her belly.

“She is doing fine.”

“What should we name her?”

“After your mom?”

She died last year after a long battle with cancer. “Your mom?” he suggested.

Brenda beamed. Then the fleeting smile disappeared as if it had never been. Over the years, she had changed from that vivacious teenager into a stubborn woman who spent her days raising the kids and her nights worrying about the future. Wrinkles fanned the outer corners of her eyes. Creases furrowed her neck. Fatigue dulled her once rosy complexion. At the age of thirty-six, she looked more like his mother than his wife. And that carefree girl? Only a distant memory. He suddenly resented her. For raising their sons during his absences. For running the house and paying the bills. For sticking by him, even if he was a bad provider and a worse father. She shouldn’t have put up with him. For this, he resented her most of all.

She knew the routine. Wordlessly she followed him out to the street. All she knew was that he had been out of town on a job, she didn’t know where and didn’t know for what. Having put up with her straw widowhood, she asked how long he would be home this time.

“I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Only if you want the kids to have a roof over their heads.”

She mumbled a few choice words but dutifully helped him upload his gear from the van. Over a spaghetti dinner, Brenda became sullen while the boys babbled. She knew something was up but didn’t ask what, the same way she hadn’t asked why Nick quit his job at the phone company to start a consulting business that took him out of town two hundred days out of the year.

Like a good wife, she laundered his clothes, put the kids down for the night, and serviced him in bed. Then she wept at the edge of her pillow. After drying her tears, Brenda went to check on the boys while Nick tucked an arm beneath his head and stared at the ceiling. The whirring blades of the ceiling fan sliced the nighttime darkness into overlapping shadows. Crickets sang a lullaby outside the window. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Rain fell gently onto the pavement. And Nick justified his actions with mental acrobatics.

His most recent assignment was an underhanded and nasty bit of business. He had probably broken a dozen federal laws. The sting was risky, and the sad sap targeted for the fall hadn’t deserve his fate. But this was Nick’s one-way ticket to a mountaintop retreat, hand-fed by nubile virgins, respected by his elders, and bowed down to by his inferiors. Only one glitch remained. Four to be exact. His lady, their twin boys, and another surprise on the way. He could have taken Brenda with him, but it wouldn’t have worked out. She was too attached to her family. It was better this way. Make a clean break, take a new name, find a new woman, make babies to safeguard his legacy, and leave any regrets behind. Brenda would be better off without him. When the deposits started appearing in their joint checking account, she would never again have to worry about money. Eventually she would forget him and find a good man, a better man than Nick could ever be.

The team rendezvoused in June. Nick took a cheap room at the outskirts of Washington. The remaining operatives arrived under similar protocols. Everyone went by code names. Alpha was the ringleader. Nick was assigned the handle of Delta. Beta, Gamma, and Epsilon made up the rest. Alpha knew each by name, but none of the operatives knew the identities of their counterparts. Voice changers and two-way radios arrived via prearranged mail drops. They only met over mobile frequencies. Their interactions were sharpshooting and vitriolic. To say they were backbiting livewires who would turn in their own mothers for a bounty was putting it mildly.

Brenda came back to bed. They made love a second time. The sex act had gotten too routine, too mechanical, like brushing your teeth or remembering to lower the toilet seat. Sometimes impotence reared its head, but not tonight. Tonight he had to get something out of his system. Tonight he had to leave Brenda with a keepsake, even if it was only a tarnished memory.

This recent job required him to case out a guy who worked for an obscure government agency. During the first week, he staked out the target’s townhouse and logged his movements. He left early for work. He usually went out for lunch and a few beers before returning to the office and finishing the workday. On Friday and Saturday nights, he met with friends, often going home well past midnight, sometimes alone and sometimes with a woman. The housecleaning service came on Monday afternoons, using a key and a special code to disarm the security system. The mail carrier came before ten in the morning. Couriers left packages at the front door by midday. No one rang the doorbell after six in the evening.

He had made his move early one morning. After the target left for work, Nick stayed in place for thirty minutes. Only when the street was deserted did he pull into the driveway of the townhouse. The garage door scanner gave him access within thirty seconds. The inner house door had been left unlocked. He lowered the garage door and went inside. The infrared code grabber bypassed the security system. He planted a few VHF transmitters, hacked the wireless modem, and left behind several surveillance devices. He booted up the target’s personal computer, quickly broke through the administrator password, copied a file containing login names and passwords, installed keylogging software programmed to transmit hourly activity, and installed a script to invisibly forward personal emails and texts to a secure account on the web. He left the same way he entered, taking the essence of the man with him.

The ensuing days turned into a sword dance of video surveillance and electronic eavesdropping; shagging, shadowing, and stalking; 24/7 shifts and fast food meals; six packs and short naps. Nick knew everything there was to know about the target. What he ate for breakfast. His preferred brand of beer. His avoidance of illicit drugs and hard liquor. His adherence to strict schedules, including an hour at the gym, running five miles three days a week, and taking martial arts classes in between. About the churchgoing aunt who raised him, the father who abandoned him, and the mother who died young. And his taste in women, which tended toward racially mixed ladies.

After three weeks of sleepless nights and mind-numbing days, Nick sent his report to Alpha via electronic encryption. He immediately cleaned up after himself, left town, and headed home, there to wait for the final signal. It would come tonight or early tomorrow morning. If all went well, he would pull out, take up the good life, and never look back.

Brenda rolled over and tossed an arm over his chest. A coyote howled at the moon, disturbing the stillness of the night, probably in the park or down by the river. Like the coyote, Nick was destined to be a loner howling at the moon, but in a different country and on the other side of the planet. He thought about the boys sleeping on twin beds across the hall. Sweet boys. Boys who took after their mother. Alex and Josh. Named after their grandfathers, both gone now. Soon they wouldn’t have a father, only the faded memories of one.

The coyote joined his brothers in a chilling chorus of solitude. Brenda sighed and turned into his arms.