Always an icy realist, Olaf knew he was too badly wounded to move, even if any of our team had remained behind to help. And the medic had been so panic-stricken that he’d forgotten to drop his kit before running for his life.

“Those who manage to return to base, each will have his own story to tell, but they all will match. Lying is the Esperanto of cowards.”

Olaf spoke as he always did, in the confidently commanding tone of a surgeon ordering a nurse to hand him a scalpel. He never needed volume to get others to listen—if you had any sense, you just moved closer.

Even now, sprawled on the jungle floor with his life bleeding away, his voice was devoid of anger or bitterness. Assuring me he knew how to die quietly—it wouldn’t be his screams that would bring the enemy closer.

All terrorists operate off the same premise: People can never find answers in the center of their own fear. Stampeding sheep will follow those ahead of them, even if it’s into a waiting slaughterhouse.

But not all human minds are programmed the same way. An injection of terror will cause an instant response in us all, but that response runs full-spectrum. Some will run; some will freeze in place, closing their eyes as a child would: “You can’t see me if I can’t see you.” It’s not that people can’t think when they’re frightened, it’s that they can’t think clearly.

This knowledge is not useful unless a fear injection takes you beyond reasoning. Some of us respond as we’ve been trained to respond. “Ne pensez pas!” our instructors would scream at us, again and again, over and over. They knew fear was inevitable; their task was to make certain it would not control us—shooting a running man in the back is not much more difficult than shooting one too terrified to run at all. So they drilled the “correct” response into us until we became Pavlovian dogs of war.

“La peur, c’est votre alliée. C’est elle qui vous titille gentiment les nerfs pour vous signaler l’approche de l’ennemi. Elle ne cherche pas s’installer, mais si vous lui ouvrez la porte, alors c’en est fini de votre alliance.”

I could translate that easily enough:

“Fear is your friend, lightly tapping on your nerves to warn you the enemy is approaching. It does not seek entrance. If you invite it in, it will no longer be your friend.”

La Légion wasn’t teaching us to protect ourselves; it was protecting its investment. We were none of us individuals. We were, all of us, disposable. But to create such disposables was time-consuming, labor-intensive work. The fewer of us they had to replace, the more value they got from their investment.

Their method was to program us as you would machines. To instill in us a sequence of reactions that left no room for thought. The better the soldier was programmed, the more reliable he would be considered. In a légionnaire, “reliable” and “valuable” were one and the same.

A distant sniper, a foamy-mouthed lunatic swinging a machete, the sound of an approaching vehicle…all the same. A trained soldier’s response to danger is as instinctive as a mother’s when her child is threatened.

Some mothers, anyway.

But the medic wasn’t a former légionnaire, just another hired hand. Maybe he didn’t drop his kit because he was too frightened to realize that the extra weight would slow his retreat. Or maybe he was thinking he might need it for himself if he wanted to keep running.

Whatever his reasons, the result was the same: there were no more morphine syrettes to ease the dying man’s last minutes—he’d used all of his immediately after the first bullet dropped him. I’d waited until the pain became deadlier than any bullet before I’d plunged all of mine high on his arm, just past the collarbone.

—

“We started with eight men,” he said. “I don’t know how many they had. It doesn’t matter—each side will tell the same lies.”

I didn’t interrupt him; he was using his inner calm to open his receptors to the fading morphine, and I didn’t know how much mileage was left on his life’s odometer.

“Three of us survived. If the other two get back to base, they will report dozens of the guerrillas attacked us.”

I didn’t want to correct him, but I needed to make sure he wasn’t already out of his head from the pain: if he lost control, he might scream, and then I’d have to finish him myself. “Four survivors,” I reminded him. “Four dead. Two ran, leaving the two of us behind.”

“There will be only one of us,” he said, his tone telling me that he wasn’t talking to himself. “Were I not so certain the enemy will report we had them trapped—perhaps three separate squads working a triangle kill—I would have told you to follow the cowards.”

“I don’t—”

“You understand perfectly.” The blade of his quiet voice easily separated the tissue of the lie I was about to weave. “I will die here, right in this spot. No rescue team is coming. Our actual commanders are not back at base. To the men with the money, we are all the same. To risk an entire squad to save a pair of us—especially if one could not be moved without extra equipment—that would violate their basic rule.”

He was an educated man, much older than me. Too old for this life.

“Then why am I still here?” I asked.

“That, I do not know. But for that gift, I am in your debt.”

“Gift? I am only—”

“Stop! No man wants to die alone. You know this. To stay, that is your gift to me. I do not question your motives; do not question my logic. Just listen to the truth; it is all of value I have left. We are what the world calls ‘mercenaries.’ Professional soldiers. We fight not for country or cause—we fight for pay.

“For us, ‘fight’ and ‘kill,’ those are the same. Whatever you fail to kill will not fail to kill you. So we keep killing until the paymasters have achieved their objective—whatever that may be. Then we are discharged.

“You understand, yes? A rifle is discharged until its magazine is empty. Then another magazine is slapped into place. But when there are no more magazines, the rifle itself is discarded. When all you can do is flee, weight becomes still another enemy. As mine is now to you.”

—

Olaf turned slightly away from me, to release some of the blood pooling inside his body.

“I speak English because I know you could not be an ex-légionnaire and a native Frenchman both. I know you are not following that fraudulent ‘code’ of theirs…that sworn oath to never abandon your dead, your wounded, or your weapons. You left them, so you must have learned why that ‘code’ was drilled into you. Who it was really meant to protect.

“We are hired killers, but to kill is nothing. It says nothing; it means nothing. No skill is required. Not even intent.”

He twisted his body once again, a reaction to pain that never reached his face or changed his voice.

“To be paid for your work does not make you a professional. Amateurs are everywhere among us. They confuse the capability of their tools with capabilities of their own. They shoot their rifles, launch their missiles, drop their bombs. Their targets are some amorphous ‘enemy.’ They do not interview the dead, they count bodies. And one body’s value is the same as another’s.”

I showed my palm, telling him to stop talking—every word would only shorten his time. Either he didn’t see my gesture or he ignored it: his voice never changed tone, as inexorable as his forthcoming death.

“If the amateur survives enough of these little wars, others will regard him as a professional. And they take care to never call him what he is: another tool, manipulated by hands he will never see, the hands of men seated at a table where no chair is reserved for him.”

There was something in his voice that told me I would not have wanted to be one of those who had manipulated the man dying next to me. Especially not this close to him—Olaf was a walking cobra, never without snap-out spikes taped to the underside of both wrists. The spikes were not much thicker than a pencil; they had a black-anodized sheath with a knurled handle, divided near the top so a thumbnail could send the venom-tipped fang on its mission. The fangs themselves were works of death-art: triangular to provide three cutting edges and a ripsaw effect when twisted, so no need for blood grooves. Why he called them his “scribes,” I never knew.

“Outside these wars we are paid to fight, there are those who kill for other reasons. Some noble, some justified, some in self-defense. And some to quench their own repulsive needs. Such foul creatures are never satisfied, no matter what they do to the helpless. For them, a kill is a meal…some more satisfying than others.

“Those kind, they take trophies; they leave signatures. When captured—and they always are—they talk. Some are cowards, who fear pain as much as they loved inflicting it. In some countries—‘civilized’ countries,” he said, hardening his voice to be sure I didn’t miss the sarcasm—“they might trade what they know for less time in prison. Some talk because that is the only gratification left to them: they count their victims in their heads as others would count money in their hands.”

“Not here.”

“No, not here. We are soldiers. If you heed my words, you will remember this, always: A soldier is paid to take orders. An assassin is paid to take lives.”

“What we are called—”

“Not the names we are called, no. Those are as false as the mythic reasons we are given to come to places like this. You know I am Norwegian—do you think I fight for the glory of Odin?”

Blood was bubbling around his mouth, but I knew that he wasn’t really asking a question, so I let him go on.

“Soldiers and assassins. Both kill. Both are paid. But only the assassin—the true assassin—understands his place in the universe.

“You might think this jungle is a lawless place, but laws are only words on paper. The assassin understands that mathematics is the only true law…always present, no matter the situation. Physics and kinetics are intuitive to the assassin—the inverse relationship between certainty of success and certainty of escape. Not merely to escape the scene of the act itself, to escape its consequences.”

—

I could see life ooze out through the field bandages I had pressed against his wounds.

I had acted quickly, with precision and skill…but without faith. I had been taught both sides of that lesson years ago, when I was still a boy. Still the property of La Légion.

“Escape is always a three-stage process,” he said, still as soft-spoken as if he was using a microphone inside a lecture hall instead of lying in a blood-leeching jungle, awaiting his last visitor. “First, not to be caught in the act; second, not to be discovered by an analysis of evidence; third, not to be betrayed.

“Betrayal may be as focused as a sniper’s bullet, or as blind as a bomb dropped in darkness—they are equally lethal.

“Evidence of assassination has no meaning. All this nonsense about disguising death—cutting a brake line so a car will crash, faking an accident—that is for the cinema. Worse, if it fails, it warns the target. And the payment for an assassin who fails is not money.

“In Asia, natives will come upon the torn body of one of their comrades. They may look closely enough to say with certainty, ‘A tiger did this.’ But they cannot say which tiger.

“So if a known tiger is missing a claw, or a tooth, they can analyze the evidence more closely. They may even name the killer: ‘Old One-Fang did this.’ But that knowledge brings them no closer to his capture.

“Why? Because tigers do not answer to names. And tigers always work alone. A tiger’s motive is not to kill; it is to feed. A tiger will always be a tiger—any other belief is superstitious babble. The tiger is as indifferent to an analysis of what it has left behind as it is immune to betrayal. It can detect a target without being seen. It carries no weapons—it is a weapon.

“The assassin has learned from the tiger—all martial arts came from the study of animal behavior. So the assassin knows: The closer to the target, the greater the possibility of success. But also the greater the chance of capture at the scene. And the greater the distance to safety. Polar opposites.

“Are you listening? Bra! The assassin need not be close to his target. He may leave no trace of his presence. But he always remains vulnerable until he reaches the highest evolution of his profession—the point where he has no comrades. The finest assassin always works alone. He works outside those deadly snares of emotion and personal need. Like the tiger, an assassin kills only to feed…not his belly, his bank account.”

—

I shifted position slightly.

No tigers roamed this jungle, no assassins threatened us. But my habits were too deeply ingrained to be abandoned. Just as darkness could impair my vision, it would sharpen my hearing—only certain creatures moved in the night.

And I knew I would always feel the presence of others. So I knew we were still alone—what I couldn’t know was for how long.

“The assassin’s ranking is measured by his longevity. And the single factor most determinant of longevity is to be anonymous,” the man said.

He did not reach for my hand, as some would have done. He used both of his to push against the bandages, as if he could prevent his life from escaping. Not to stay alive longer, to finish his lecture: Olaf was a man who paid his debts.

—

“The assassin understands misdirection. He knows that to use the same tools—or even the same method—will eventually attract the attention of those who hunt by pattern recognition.

“Does that mean the assassin should never use the same tools or repeat his methods? No. But both must be abandoned at some point. And best if at different points.

“Not buried, not hidden—vanished. Atomized into the same air we all breathe. The assassin may take intentionally what those who hunt for their own needs have a compulsion to take. Done several times, it will throw the hounds off the scent. Trophies may be taken, but never kept. This is a rule that cannot be violated.

“So ‘clues’ may be scattered as carelessly as seed, but only if the field beneath it is incapable of penetration—seeds that do not take root cannot yield blossoms. A symbol left at the scene may require a spray can, but that spray can must never be purchased, or even stolen from a nearby store. A sniper’s bullet may yield a ballistic match only if the barrel continues to exist beyond the shot. An assassin may never have a ‘relationship’ with his tools—whatever is used must be as doomed as the target itself.

“You must never accept a contract where the death of the target would produce only a single beneficiary. The leader of a criminal organization is not the same as the wealthy husband of a much younger widow.”

You? I thought to myself. It feels as if Luc is still teaching me, through this dying man’s mouth.

“If the target is always surrounded by bodyguards, the assassin must regard them all equally—they are as much a danger to him as he himself is to the target. The perfect assassin would have no human contact.

“But that is only half the perfection. And the other half cannot be achieved…because the assassin must be paid. The elite assassin will have a receiver-dispenser, one whom neither he nor his employer ever meets. Once, it was mail drops. Today, it can be done electronically.

“Still, some degree of trust is required. The electronic middleman will know if information about him is being sought. So the assassin must never seek such information—he would be detected as easily as a scorpion on a white sheet, putting himself in danger. And if the assassin himself detects a probe for information coming from that unseen middleman, he must use his skills to protect himself.”

I moved my head just enough to assure Olaf I was listening.

“There are, in all the world, perhaps less than a dozen such middlemen,” he said. “They can minimize any risk to themselves, but not eliminate it entirely—those who wish to purchase the services of an assassin must have some way of making contact. Why less than a dozen? That is a dozen left. Their success is measured exactly as is the assassin’s…in longevity.”

—

“Why do you tell me this?” I asked, my volume tuned to his—pitched as low as a whisper, but without the hiss.

“Because you have been taught nothing but lies. You still worship the samurai, those men tied so closely to their masters that they were required to take their own lives when their master lost his. Ah, great warriors, the samurai. Like the Vikings. But all they truly have in common is their enslavement.”

“We are free to—”

“Serve new masters, yes. Ronin, then, if you like. But only the ninja is truly free. The despised ninja. The stealthy man-for-hire. Not some warrior with a ‘code,’ an assassin with none. Only the assassin has that ultimate freedom—to make his own choices, and to be his own judge.

“I know I am finished. Finally. I have no fear of what is to come. I know there is no Valhalla awaiting my entrance. That I would fear, if I believed, because I have long since forfeited any such possibility. But no religion will defeat the laws which govern all on this earth. I am quite ready to die. And I know it will happen well before the enemy returns to this spot.”

“But…”

“Yes, I heard you. Why do I tell you all this? You could have left me to savages who would prolong my death for their own entertainment. You should have. Why you did not, I cannot know. I doubt you know. If I had money, it would be yours. I would tell you where it was…because you have made no attempt to learn that for yourself. But I have no money. So what I give you is everything I have left. This knowledge.”

“You had all this knowledge, yet you ended up in this miserable jungle,” I answered him, “fighting as a soldier with no flag. A man for hire. Why, then?”

“You were a légionnaire. So you have already heard this nonsense the French call ‘philosophique.’ Proudhon says, ‘Property is theft,’ and spawns what? Anarchy? Any man who signs on as we did knows anarchy better than some café philosopher. Or perhaps we have all achieved existentialist perfection? We know the world is absurd, and all attempts to understand it are doomed. We are what we do, so we have chosen to invent and live by our own values, rather than slavishly follow those of another.”

His throat spasmed as he fought back a cough. But he expelled flesh from his mouth, so I knew whatever had hit his midsection had finally reached a lung.

“There is no inherent truth in any philosophy. Everything is ‘flexible’; all ‘open to interpretation.’ Your great Camus, he was an existentialist, but so was Nietzsche. Camus resisted fascism when his country was invaded by Nietzsche’s ‘supermen,’ the Nazis. A contradiction? No. But what position did Camus take on the French campaign to keep Algeria in slavery?”

I didn’t know, so I didn’t answer. And I could feel Olaf was almost gone.

“Here is my only legacy. When you leave, take my scribes with you. They will write the truth. And this electronic address”—he dropped his voice even lower—“it will allow you to contact one of the few middlemen still alive. You say you are selling special ice cubes from the best of refrigerators; he will then know I am gone, and that your message is genuine.

“What I have passed on to you was passed on to me,” he said, very softly. “I listened with respect, but I failed to listen closely enough. The need for…I don’t know what to call it, perhaps the need for another person to be in my life, that need is what has now cost me my own.”

“You picked the wrong person to…?”

I never finished the question I wanted to ask. When I glanced down, I saw that the man who had willed off his approaching death long enough to pass along his legacy had finally finished his journey.

—

And started mine.

The last man I killed for pay had wanted to die. Desperately, needfully wanted to die. The job had come to me from a cyber-person I would never meet. I say “cyber-person” because I never knew if communication was with a man or a woman—a machine has no gender.

But I didn’t fear betrayal from that source. Long ago, I had told myself that, somehow, “he” was the grandson of a man Luc had served with in La Résistance. Luc was my father—in all ways but biological. Luca Adrian was the name he gave me, knowing that it would no longer exist the moment my nom de guerre was entered on the roster of La Légion Étrangère.

It had been so many years since the cyber-ghost had entered my life that betrayal was not a question in my mind.

Later, a woman—a girl, really; I believe she was too young to have served with Médecins Sans Frontières without having erased her past as I had mine—triggered something in me. She was everything the man who had once been an assassin had warned me against.

Maybe that started when she took my weapons: my pistol, the Vietnam tomahawk, and my garrote. No weapons inside their field hospital allowed. I never got them back.

It was years—and that blind tumble of the dice that fools call “destiny” or “karma”—before I saw that woman again. More accurately, our paths crossed for a second time. But from that moment, I knew she was real, not some angelic phantom my fevered brain had summoned up while I was close to dying. In another jungle, another war.

From that moment, I did everything I could think of to bring her to me. She’d told me her secret. I knew that her “it will never happen” dream was a place where she could live in peace, finally out of that unrelenting stream of dead, dying, and tortured human beings. The stream she’d been trying to stem with her own life—body and soul—since what seemed like forever to her. She knew if she didn’t get out she’d be swept along, too. And what good would she be to anyone then?

I found that place, just as she’d envisioned it. I offered it to her. I offered myself, too. I knew I had not been part of her dream, so all I could do was ask to join her.

That meant telling her the truth.

I did that.

When she accepted me, I lived without fear of what Olaf had warned me against. If my Dolly were to betray me, I would not want such knowledge to precede my death.

—

Before Dolly, I had given up many things.

Some taken from me, before I learned. Some after, when I had to discard weight to move quickly.

Both my childhoods—the one that had been wiped from my memory before I ran from that “clinic” in Belgium, and the briefer but so much richer one that I’d had with Luc—gone forever.

To be a mercenary may not have been my fate, but it was the only option I had. When that first five years was up, I left La Légion. I’d served long enough to walk away…but to where? The five years gave me French citizenship, but I didn’t want that any more than the French wanted me. No gitan could be truly French, and that part of my chromosomal chain was stamped across my face as clearly as the thickened slab of scar tissue on my wrist. And I couldn’t cover my face with a sleeve.

Soldiering was all I knew. I went back to Darkville, and signed on with one of the mercenary outfits. Being a former légionnaire was all the credential I needed. They knew no man would make such a claim falsely—too many of us had later become soldiers-for-hire to take that much risk.

But waiting with Olaf as he stayed alive long enough to deliver his only legacy, that was when I decided. That was the moment I knew that the day would come when I would walk away from soldiering for paymasters, and never return.

Still, in a strange way, I have always followed his rules. Killing for money, that I did. But when Dolly accepted me, that part of me was gone—the man she wanted was no killer-for-money, and I had to be that man.

—

And now, so many years later, I was an impossible construct. A force mathematics could not rule; an assassin who once would kill anyone for money and now would forfeit his own life with equal lack of concern.

Worse, he would do that only for the one person who could really, truly betray him.

—

I spent half my life searching for what I would spend the rest of it defending.

That wasn’t some random thought. It wasn’t something I ever consciously considered—it was simply the way things were.

If others are trying to kill you, “Why?” is a question you get to speculate about only if they don’t succeed.

“Simple” isn’t the same as stupid. My world has been black-and-white ever since I could remember.

But my memory—my actual memory, a past I could look back on—that started much later than most. I’m not even sure how old I was—nine, ten, eleven, even?—when I escaped that “clinic.” That’s the word they used for it, but it wasn’t healing anyone. Or curing them, or whatever clinics are supposed to be doing. It just kept us.

And there really was no “us.” I didn’t actually understand this until many years later. Not until I was a légionnaire did I learn that even POW camps aren’t what they appear to be. The razor wire and the armed men walking the perimeter—some with shoulder-strapped machine pistols, some with dogs—you’d think that was just one side guarding its captives. But those captives weren’t a single unit. They probably killed more of their own than any guards did; the only weapon they would need for that was betrayal.

None expected to be traded for their side’s captives. Men awaiting execution are desperate. Men who would welcome execution instead of the daily “interrogations” are driven past the edge of sanity. Digging a tunnel is a madman’s task. But the plotting, that never stopped. And was never shared.

When the guards learned of a plot, or even discovered a weapon, some captives died. Not just the ones the guards took away; those who had betrayed them, too. The most deadly thing in those camps was always their inhabitants—suspicion was God, and traitors were sacrificed on that altar all the time.

If any of the captives wondered if perhaps the man they killed hadn’t actually been proved a traitor, they would keep such thoughts to themselves.

No barbed wire had surrounded my childhood. There were no patrols. The adults—doctors, nurses, orderlies—they were kind to us. The food was plentiful, and it was good food, not a prisoner’s slop. The place was always the same temperature, and the inside air was clean.

But the children inside that place had nothing in common, not even whatever brought us there. Some kids were malformed, huge heads on stick bodies. Some drooled. Some never stopped talking, in a language I didn’t understand. Some hardly moved.

All we had to share was the truth, and it wasn’t a truth we could share. Only this one truth: It had to be very expensive to keep us there. All that equipment, even the buildings and the grounds, never mind the salaries. So, really, two truths: whoever put us there didn’t lack for money…and didn’t want us in their lives.

I knew what “retrograde amnesia” was. Not because I was so smart, but because the doctors explained it to me. That was why I had no memory of anything before that place, they said. They also said that, if the trauma that had wiped my mind had been powerful enough, those memories might never come back.

“You have to start from now,” they would say. Kindly, but unyielding. They either didn’t know what had erased any memory of my life before I woke up in that place, or wouldn’t tell me. For me, those were the same.

They would say this “Start from now” as if it was a magic chant. But they never would say where I would be going once I started.

Somehow, I knew I could not “start” unless I stopped waiting. One night, I just dropped out the second-floor window of my room onto the soft, moist grass of the manicured lawn, and walked into the darkness.

How long it took, I couldn’t be sure—time is more difficult to measure when you move only in darkness. I know I walked all the way to Paris. There, I became a gutter rat. I was sometimes very cold. I was always hungry. But it never occurred to me to try and return to that clinic.

Then Luc found me.

—

I was a boy then.

By the time I was big enough to lie to La Légion about my age, the time had come for Luc to leave. I think he probably stayed longer than he should have, but he wanted to be sure I had…a chance, is the best way to put it.

The same thing Olaf had done, many years after that.

English—“American,” as it was called by some men I served with—was my native tongue. French I had learned: some in the clinic, more from Luc. He had warned me not to let anyone see I knew more than the few words La Légion required us all to learn.

I knew I must have a mother—a woman who gave birth to me—somewhere. A father, I never thought about. Luc was my father. I could reason that whoever had placed me inside that clinic must have been wealthy. But if they ever spent a sou looking for me after I’d fled, I never knew.

—

I never looked for them, either.

I had Luc. Then Patrice. Both long dead. One from age, one from bullets. But, really, from the same cancerous truth: They could never go back to what they had lost. There was no “home” for them.

Olaf had been my friend, too. Not as I was with Patrice, but we were close enough to watch out for each other in that jungle.

All those I had once cared for were gone. After they left, I became a man very skilled in making people dead.

—

Making them dead in exchange for money, that is what I always told myself.

Had I not found Dolly—found she was a real woman, not an apparition—I would never have abandoned my life. Nor ever become part of hers.

Now none of that mattered. For the man I had become, killing wasn’t about tools, or even skills—it was embedded, forever to be a part of me.

And that part, no amnesia would ever enter.

—

The Crown Jewel of the Coast is what they called it on the signs that welcomed tourists.

I couldn’t really say if this little town was a strange place. It always seemed so to me, but I’d never lived in any one place before. I’d been many places, but I was always a stranger, passing through. Or an invader, with a job to do.

After La Légion, after I’d stopped working as a soldier for pay and followed Olaf’s last advice, there was only one thing that mattered. All I’d ever looked at was how to get out…as soon as I’d done whatever I’d come there to do.

Maybe towns are no different from cities; it’s just that the cities divide themselves into neighborhoods. Maybe every little spot has its own personality, because people who feel the same way always seem to clump together.

For me, it never mattered how people felt. I didn’t go to those places to find a job; I went there to do one. I didn’t need to make friends; I only needed to make myself a part of my surroundings. And never for very long.

I never wanted people to remember me. It would be best if they never saw me at all.

—

Now all I wanted was to be left alone.

But to be alone with my Dolly was impossible. I knew the truth of this village before I found the little cottage near the ocean, the place Dolly had dreamed of for so many years. Why would a tiny little town be any different from the biggest city?

I never said this aloud. To me, it meant nothing. There is a perimeter around our cottage, one several layers deeper than any fence that could be built. Inside it, my Dolly would always be safe.

That was my mistake—thinking the barrier built to protect her would also contain her. I may have wanted only to be left alone, but Dolly, she couldn’t leave things alone. Once she got the scent of…I don’t know what to call it, but it would turn her into a rat-hunting terrier. And once she clamped down, Satan himself couldn’t make her drop the bite.

Dolly was immune to bribery or threats. Any fool would know that a former battlefield nurse who had worked the darkest parts of Africa with a Médecins Sans Frontières team wouldn’t be tempted by money, and couldn’t be scared off. Such attempts would only make her shake the rat by the back of its neck until she heard the snap! that confirmed the kill.

—

“What is wrong with these people?”

“What people, honey?”

“The people here, Dell. They can get into blood feuds over that stupid ‘paper versus plastic’ thing, but when you add one more layer to any fight, they won’t even look at it.”

“Paper is better because people throw the plastic away, and the seagulls could choke on it, right?”

“Dell…”

I just looked up at her. Once Dolly’s hands went to her hips, I knew anything I said could set her off—silence was always my best course then.

“They need trees to make paper,” Dolly said, quietly. “So where does a true-blue environmentalist stand?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you build a road through the other side of town so the logging trucks can reach the bay, the ‘Buy American’ crowd says you’re helping the local economy. But when that garbage lumber is shipped to China, so they can make crappy furniture or whatever and sell it here, is that supposed to be helping the economy?”

“I guess both sides—”

“Don’t even,” she warned me. “The first step you take, in either direction, you’ve started walking in a circle. If the supermarkets have to use paper bags, they say it forces them to raise prices. And the people who have to clean up after their dogs, they want plastic, too. But don’t tell them about jobs for the people who make those plastic bags—those jobs are all in China. And some of those fools actually think you can use dog droppings to make a compost heap. But paper bags are pulp—biodegradable, right?”

“Dolly…”

“Dolly what?”

“You’re just doing what they do.”

“You mean…just talking?”

“No. I’d never say that about you. But we both came from the same place, didn’t we?”

“Us? The jungle, you mean? When we first…I guess ‘met’ doesn’t exactly fit, but it is the jungle you are saying, yes?”

“Yes.”

“What does that prove?”

“We weren’t on opposite sides then.”

“Dell! You were there to…”

“Kill people for money?” I said, watching that special shade of rose blossom on her cheeks, then turn dark.

“I don’t care what you call it. I didn’t care then; I don’t care now. But whether you were a…soldier, or a mercenary, or…It doesn’t matter. We—our team, I mean—we were there to save lives. You were there to take lives. How could that make us on the same side?”

“Because, for both of us, there was no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ You didn’t care what uniform a man was wearing when you patched him up. Or took off a leg to save his life. You didn’t judge. At least you—your people, I mean—you didn’t judge then.”

“We still don’t,” she said, in a tone that told me she wasn’t going to be moved off her square. A voice I’d heard before. Many times. Dolly could out-mule anyone.

“It’s not that way anymore, girl. Today, your comrades have to make certain deals just to be allowed to save lives. I don’t mean take sides, but the only way any medical team can work in some of those places is to negotiate free passage. And when they don’t, they’re gone. Didn’t Burma—or whatever it’s calling itself today—didn’t they just kick Médecins Sans Frontières out of the country because they didn’t want anyone who wasn’t Buddhist to have medical care?”

“That’s not—”

“Yes, it is,” I cut her off. “You want to drop fifty tons of food supplies into a starvation zone, you have to give the warlords their piece before they allow you the privilege of driving into the zone yourself.”

“So?”

“So what’s the difference between feeding an army and giving them weapons?”

“You’re saying it’s wrong to do that?”

“No. I’m saying what I’ve been trying to say. Just let me finish, okay?”

She didn’t say anything, letting the tapping of one fingernail on the tabletop tell me to get on with it.

“For me, there was no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ If you’re a working merc, you assume whoever’s hiring you is some kind of liar. And once you hit the ground, it doesn’t matter—the only way you collect your pay is to get through the fighting alive. And the only way to do that is to make some other people dead.

“See what I’m saying here? Sure, you can lie to yourself. But even that doesn’t matter: the winners get to name the losers. We’re ‘liberators’ or ‘freedom fighters.’ Or we’re hired guns, with no loyalty to any cause…or, worse, a loyalty that’s for sale.

“You don’t have to hate a man wearing a certain uniform to shoot him, not if you know he’s going to shoot you. And you don’t have to care what a man’s uniform is to save his life, either.”

“Saving a life is always—”

“You don’t believe that, Dolly. Not anymore. Not for a long time.”

“I guess I don’t,” she said, the sorrow in her voice mourning the loss of True North in the compass she’d once carried inside herself. I still remember her telling me that everyone carried some kind of compass, but, until I atoned for the things I’d done, mine would just be a dial with no needle.

—

“You think it’s like that…like this, everywhere?” she asked me in bed, late that same night.

“I’m not a philosopher,” I told her, as if Olaf was speaking for me. “It’s been like that everywhere I’ve ever been, that’s all I could say.”

“Corrupt?”

“The place itself doesn’t have to be. I don’t even think it’s human nature to value…things. Yeah, ‘things,’ that fits. Everybody wants food and water, everyone wants to be safe. That’s in all of us. But some people want…not things, exactly. Maybe, I don’t know…power? Whatever you call it, some people want it. Want it bad enough to do anything to get it. Anything to keep it.

“And when they can actually see what they want, it’s like a sniper acquiring a target—if you’re in the way, your life means nothing. We, you and me, we could be the only two people on some tropical island, and we’d be fine. But if one of the people I’m talking about discovered that island held something they wanted, they’d do…anything.”

“Maybe that’s why I thought saving lives had a special value,” Dolly said, propping herself on her elbow, like that could make her see me better in the dark. “How could someone whose life was saved, saved by people who asked nothing in return, how could they be the same person after that?”

“Why not? They might bless you, call you their savior, thank whatever god they worshipped for your existence on this earth. But they’d be back doing whatever they’d been doing soon enough.”

What I didn’t say is how I knew this was pure truth. I’d been one of those killers. When my life was spared only because I stumbled into a coven of mercy-dealing angels, I didn’t bless anyone for that. Or even thank them. What I did was go back to work.

“What could be so damn valuable about this place, Dell? That stupid logging road, what difference is it going to make? Some people will make money; some people will lose money. It’s just money.”

“For a lot of people, there’s no ‘just’ in there, honey. If you think money can buy you what you want, what you need…if you think money can transform you into someone else, then—”

“Dell, remember—just a few weeks ago?—that old man was walking by himself near the jetty on the other side of the bridge? And that gang of…I don’t even know what to call them, but they beat him to death. Four of them, and what did they get? Seventy dollars and some change. How could that be worth a man’s life?”

“You’ve been reading those press releases again.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Isn’t that what it said in the papers? That the prosecutor said they killed an old man for a lousy seventy dollars?”

“So?”

“So they didn’t kill him for seventy dollars, honey. They killed him because they’ve got lizard brains. When they threatened him, maybe the old man still wouldn’t give them his money. So they figured he must have a lot of money to stand up to the four of them. Or maybe they just beat him to death for the fun of it, and the money was just a bonus.”

“To you, there’s no difference? I mean, whether they were just stupid robbers or blood-thirsty savages?”

“I wasn’t there, little girl. But it sure didn’t make any difference to the old man.”

—

The next few days were quiet.

Early summer. Hummingbirds fighting over a fuchsia bush, jays screaming at the chipmunks digging up acorns they’d stashed. Rascal patrolling, keeping the whole place a cat-free zone.

But that wasn’t his job; it was just something he wanted to do. When Dolly was outside, humming a Piaf tune to herself as she groomed one of the lily hybrids she was trying to develop, Rascal went into a different mode.

Guard.

No barking, no threatening. If you walked back there and surprised Dolly, you wouldn’t be walking out. Rascal was a self-launching torpedo in a tiny ocean he could navigate blind. And if you dove in, you were dead in the water.

Everything as it should be.

Peaceful. Precious. Protected.

—

Then a coalition of environmentalists showed up.

I don’t mean they were outsiders. This town is home to dozens of Green Groups, each of them aimed at a different target. Lumber mills, toxic waste, endangered species…

Some of them were always “calling for” something. Boycotts were a favorite: eggs had to come from free-range chickens, beef from cattle that hadn’t been dosed with antibiotics, salmon mustn’t have been “ranched.” Some also went international: whaling, dolphin capture, global warming…a long list.

“Green” had religious status, but some of its splinter groups were so small they only had one member. I know this because of a letter the newspaper printed. The writer proclaimed he’d “be well within my rights” if he were to go ahead with a lawsuit he was “contemplating.” His next-door neighbor actually smoked in his own backyard! So, every time the wind shifted, the letter writer was exposed to secondhand smoke against his will.

I don’t know if he expected some enviro-posse to form or what, but responders either took his letter as some kind of spoof or loudly distanced their group from him.

Me, I didn’t think this nasty little man cared about anything but his “rights.” Deep-rooted entitlement was like any other infection, except for one thing: whoever caught it didn’t want it cured, he wanted it spread.

Normally, for the actual groups to join forces on anything was unheard of, but now they’d united for the common cause of blocking this logging road the government wanted to build.

It wasn’t the road itself they had banded together to fight, it was the route that had been picked for it—a jagged Z-line through a few hundred acres of land nobody wanted. Nothing grew there except for some scrubby bush and stunted trees. No river, no lake, no access to the bayfront. Any road cut through there probably wouldn’t even displace a raccoon. But it was state-owned land, so it belonged to “the people.”

As at other places I’d been, everyone was claiming to speak for “the people.” Harder to do in Oregon, since the Indians were the “original” people. At least, that’s what those who had voted against building a casino on private land said…and they won. But when the local tribe wouldn’t even take the land as a gift, the gates opened up.

That was when this coalition emerged to protect “virgin green space” from “government rape.” Why chain yourself to a tree that was going to be cut down no matter what you did? Why not just buy the whole parcel outright, and legally bar any road? It couldn’t cost that much.

But that wouldn’t work, they said, shouting “Eminent domain!” like the threat of an approaching tsunami.

Then the “small government” crowd jumped in, forming common cause with the “enviros” for the first time. The state couldn’t just take property—private property was no different from the right to privacy itself. If the Second Amendment was to have any meaning, it would have to apply to more than just fighting any ban against a citizen’s right to own firearms, including those stupid background checks. The state wouldn’t even know who to take the property from, except that all deeds had to be filed, and “Registration Is the First Step to Confiscation!”

Those posters were plastered all over town. That put the “all power belongs to the people” crowd on autopilot.

So many referendums were slated for the next ballot that the Voters’ Pamphlet would be the size of a phone book. It’s easy to get damn near anything on a ballot out here. I don’t know how many signatures you need, but it’s not a lot. There’s no polling booths; you just mail your ballot in.

But even that was too much trouble for some.

One group had a Web site saying that they were united against paper voting. Dolly had insisted on showing it to me. “Can you believe it? It’s not about the hassle of standing in line, or even ‘hanging chads.’ They’re angry because they actually have to mail their ballots. They want to vote over the Internet, the same way they do their banking, pay their bills, and find their true love. They need to be ‘connected’ all the time. There’s enough of them to actually get a referendum going. But a ballot initiative requires a certain number of signatures, and you can’t gather those online…so they’re not going to be bothered even doing that much!”

Their Web site’s banner was “Passive Resistance.” I guess that meant, if they couldn’t vote online, they’d boycott every ballot.

I got the “passive” part easy enough, but I didn’t think even Gandhi could find a trace of the other half.

—

“Get it, Tontay!”

I looked out the back window. Half a dozen teenage girls in cheerleader outfits, bouncing up and down in their eagerness to encourage Dolly. For years, our “kitchen” had been swarming with teenage girls, turning it into some kind of…clubhouse, I guess. Not a hangout for outcasts, but a place where they’d be welcomed—one of Dolly’s rules.

Dolly’s rules always had reasons. Her reasons. The school’s princesses mixed with the untouchables in her house or else it was la porte for them. None of them wanted to be excluded from a place where they could learn things they all wanted to know…and be loved at the same time.

She’d been “Aunt Dolly” to them until she suddenly decided that made her sound too old. The minute she said, “That’s Tante Dolly to you!” they all picked up on it. But my wife hadn’t made the jump from English to French quick enough, so “tante” came out “tontay,” and they’d converted that mess into their name for her.

Any kind of strict glance from Dolly when they used it just started them all giggling. I guess she finally gave up trying to stop them.

Those girls knew Dolly would rapid-fire French at me if she didn’t want them to understand, so I think they were playing dumb with this “Tontay” nonsense. I kept that thought to myself.

“If I break something, you’d all better start running,” Dolly mock-threatened, igniting another chorus of giggling. Then my wife—who had been a yoga practitioner since she was a child—jumped up, threw her hands toward the sky, and floated to the ground, landing in a perfect split.

“Wow!” one of the cheerleaders shouted. They all applauded, as happy as if it was raining beauty on them.

—

“Something else is going on, Dell,” she said to me.

It was after midnight. We were in bed, and Rascal had planted himself at the threshold to our bedroom, like he’d trained himself to do.

“With what?”

“With that whole logging-road fight.”

“Fight? It’s like some kind of hobby for them. They have to show how ‘green’ they are, like a damn religion. But it’s just talk. Like those anti-tax people. They always get stuck in their own glue.”

“I know you don’t think much of—”

“It’s not that, honey. It’s that circle thing. Uh…Okay, you remember when some of them started a campaign to ban the sale of cigarettes? Not to minors, to everyone. Statewide. But before they could even get it on the ballot, some of that same crowd said tobacco was sacred to Native Americans, and we couldn’t disrespect their culture. They kept going round and round, but they never got around. To doing anything, I mean.”

“I know,” my wife said, a sad tone in her voice that I’d heard before. Not often, which is probably why I picked up on it so quickly. “But there’s a different…intensity to this thing.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t know, Dell. But it’s not like usual. That piece of ground, it’s, I don’t know how to say this, but…vibrating. Like a big train is coming.”

—

I didn’t know what people in the village thought of me.

Most of them probably didn’t even know I existed. But those who did knew if anyone tried to hurt Dolly it would be the worst kind of mistake. Nothing to do with my pride, my self-respect, or my ego. And it wasn’t possessiveness, either. You don’t own a woman like Dolly. But protect her, that I could do.

For me, Dolly was that raison d’être future-promised to all new legionnaires. A promise none of us ever expected would be kept, so we felt no disappointment when it turned out to be still another lie, part of our daily diet. To be disappointed, you must first be surprised.

Olaf had never been a legionnaire. To us, “survivor” had a different meaning. Those who survived the training could never lie about it. Who would we lie to? Our commanders watched the training. They could count the survivors easily enough—they knew exactly what those survivors would have proved.

The tests would get progressively more difficult. Not just physically—the assault on each man’s will never stopped. They said this tested the ability to “adapt.” To show fear, that was acceptable…so long as the fear did not alter your conduct. But to show despair, no. That was considered a sure sign of a man who would not succeed in the field.

Our ranks were culled as a breeder of dogs would destroy runts from each litter. Only the “best” got to prance around in shows, pampered like royalty throughout their lives. But such a life was reserved for dogs. For men like us, passing all the tests meant we would be awarded the privilege of war.

And those survivors could not lie, either. If you started out with eight men, you returned with eight men. Not necessarily alive, but all bodies had to be accounted for.

Never abandon your dead or your wounded. Never. But instead of some esprit de corps, our only code was that of the criminal: Whatever you see doesn’t matter, not if you keep that information to yourself.

I was there when a tall, ink-black Senegalese we knew only as “Idrissa” locked eyes with my friend Patrice, forming an invisible bridge over the body of another man—a soldier so badly wounded he would never survive being carried back to our camp. I watched as both men nodded their silent agreement. Patrice shot the dying man in the top of his head. Idrissa swung his heavy blade in a short arc, cutting through flesh and bone as easily as a knife through brie. I picked up the dead man’s rifle as Idrissa held the severed hand of the forearm he’d removed and slammed it against the brush to roughen the edges of his too-clean strike.

When we got back to base, Patrice explained that the enemy had launched an RPG round, and all that we could find of the dead man was what Idrissa was still holding. I handed over his rifle.

We were questioned, individually first, and then as a unit. Our accounts did not vary. Our commanders were not surprised at this.

Maybe that was why they reacted with such lavish praise years later, when I carried what was left of Patrice’s machine-gunned body all the way back on my own. None of our unit had offered to help me with that insane task. I would have refused if they had. I knew they would still stay close enough to cover me. Even if they regarded me as a demented fool, they couldn’t move much more quickly than I did. If they arrived ahead of me, they would have to explain why two bodies had not been returned.

I could never say why this mattered so much to me. I knew there would be no shipment home, no funeral mass held, no tombstone to honor him. Patrice would be buried in the dark earth that surrounded our camp.

The officers allowed me to dig the grave. It took me all through the night to make it deep enough to keep predators from digging up the body. Hyenas count on vultures to point out fresh kills, but those carrion eaters are pure sight-hunters. I rolled some heavy stones over the spot to discourage the jackals even more.

I must have passed out at some point. When I awoke, another night was coming on.

I wished I knew some words, but I was empty.

How could I say aloud that my true friend’s only dream would never become truth? Patrice had avenged his childhood mate so openly that even his comrades back in Ireland told him he could not hope to return for many years. Any revolutionary who dared take the life of a soldier in the Army of Occupation would be ruthlessly hunted. Or informed on. Patrice had to stay away until…

I knew there would never be another like him in my life.

—

Dolly wasn’t the kind of woman who could content herself with sadness.

“Widow’s weeds suit some,” Patrice had told me, another life ago. “That’s their role, to mourn. Ah, sure, after a proper period…a year or so…they could find another man. But some of them, they never do. It’s not that they loved their man so deep that no other could measure up. That’s their story, maybe, but a story it is, lad—one they keep on telling, because no one would dare tell them to stop.”

I don’t know what Dolly would do if I was gone, but I know what she wouldn’t do.

—

Like I said, our kitchen wasn’t just a place to cook.

Dolly had me take down a wall when we first moved in. I’m no expert with tools—not with the kind you use for carpentry, anyway. But I can tell if a wall is load-bearing, and the one that separated the kitchen from the living room wasn’t.

When I was done, we didn’t have a living room anymore, but the kitchen was big enough for a damn restaurant. It even kind of looked like one, with that long slab of butcher block, the chairs surrounding it, and the “half-bath” I’d built into a corner.

That’s where Dolly’s mob gathered. Every day, after school, it would be crammed with kids—mostly girls, speaking some foreign language. They used English words, but I couldn’t decode their speech. What was I supposed to make of a bunch of girls gathered around a laptop screen, looking at a boy with blond-streaked red hair holding a pistol in one hand and a microphone in the other?

“Oh, get you some of that Wonder Bread cred!” one of them cracked.

Dolly was laughing, too.

Like I said, I couldn’t understand any of it.

But I always knew when they had some kind of “project.” The table would accumulate mounds of paper, more would be pushpinned to the cabinets, still more littered around the floor. Maybe they were having fun, but it looked like work to me—they didn’t talk as much, and when they did, it was in short, clipped sentences.

“You got the plat map?” Dolly asked a girl wearing a camo tank top. That had become their private fashion statement, ever since Dolly had started wearing that same top over cargo pants.

The girl just nodded.

“Can you make some room for it, Cue?” I wouldn’t have known how to spell that name. “Queue” would be pronounced the same, or even just “Q.” But that was on a long list of things that were none of my business.

A very tall girl with long black hair that fell straight down her back, as flat as if she’d ironed it, stood up. She took some piece of paper from the other girl, got up on her toes, extended her arms, and managed to tack it up above some other stuff.

That was my Dolly. Making the other girls see that being a beanpole had value; it was nothing to snicker about.

There was no set of written rules, but they all seemed to know them. The little bathroom was always sparkling and fresh-smelling, the stainless-steel twin sinks immaculate: “You use it, you clean it” was as much a part of the climate as the ban on dope and booze. Dolly didn’t care if any of her mob had a pack of cigarettes in her purse, so long as it stayed there.

Everybody got a second chance. Nobody got a third.

Rascal was making his rounds, circling the table, scoring treats from every girl. Dolly made sure those treats were healthy stuff, and all of them the same—there was always a big jar in the middle of the table, and the girls were limited to one each. The mutt acknowledged me with a look that said, “I’m on the job.”

Meaning: his job was to protect Dolly, and he could handle that just fine without me.

I didn’t know what they were all up to, and I didn’t feel like trying to read in the room Dolly insisted on calling my “den.” Sometimes, kids would wander in there, and I didn’t feel like talking to any of them, either. They always asked questions. Some days, that was okay with me. Not now.

In my basement, there was no chance of unexpected visitors. The only entrance is down at the end of a hall, and there was no reason for anyone to enter the hallway. Even Rascal knew that.

The door was heavy steel, coated with a thin veneer of cheap-looking wood. It opened with a keypad. When I closed it behind me, I was in another world.

—

“Mercenary” has always been a synonym for “myth.”

More today than ever, with so many viewing screens that are most people’s only connection to what they think is “real.”

Books, too, I guess. Some of them would have you believe that there were hundreds of martial artists with magical chi who’d once worked as secret agents before they turned into movie stars.

If those guys could only find a way to pull off some “death match” over bandwidth, the Internet would be swimming in blood.

None of that is dangerous, not by itself. But some mercenaries who learn distrust is their truest friend never learn to distrust themselves. That kind, they work jungle long enough, they’re at risk for believing the worst myth of all—the one that says they’ve developed some “sixth sense.” Not hyper-acute hearing or selective sense of smell—you work the field long enough, that comes naturally. No, some kind of special power—a magical alarm system that’s theirs and theirs alone.

That only ends one of two ways: they let themselves nod off, trusting that “signal” to alert them in time, or that signal never stops beaming its message. If that happens, they start emptying every magazine blindly into the dark. That’s the worst. Exposed and out of ammo at the same time.

Nobody stays that way for long.

What does keep you alive is pattern recognition. When that software finally downloads into all your senses, you’ll lock onto any disruption in the patterns you expect.

I learned this slowly, over a long period of time. Each piece added to what I had before it. The only way to learn all that was by listening. And I was a good listener, always careful to sift. The only thing I knew for sure was that anyone could lie—would lie—if it got him something he wanted.

Surviving that “training” was…I’m not sure, exactly, but some part of it had to be blind luck. And maybe some part of what Luc had taught me before I ever opened the only door left open to me. The longer I soldiered, the better I got at learning who I should be listening to. Men like Patrice, men like Olaf. I say that as if there were so many. There were not. But each one made me even more cautious about the next.

Even when I quit—quit forever—I never forgot.

That’s why I had to be down in my basement that day. Something was wrong. I knew it, even if I couldn’t explain how I knew. Inside me, only this: to distrust that knowledge would be disrespectful of all those who had taught me.

“You think this is a jungle, lad, you should spend some time in Belfast when Her Royal Majesty’s killers are on the hunt,” Patrice had told me, a lifetime ago. “Some with maps drawn for them by the bloody grasses.”

Yes. If “home” is a piece of surrounded, landlocked ground, you’re out of options. Patrice knew the truth of things.

In their own way, they all had. All those I trusted enough to listen to, anyway.

But now, no matter how hard I concentrated, nothing came to me clearly enough to do something with it. Just that sense of disruption, too jagged for any image to emerge.

Hours passed. I stayed as still within myself as I knew how. Dialing down my heartbeat, slowing myself inside and out.

It wasn’t until I felt Dolly at the core of my stillness that I knew. It wasn’t me being hunted.

—

“It’s me,” I whispered to Rascal as I moved toward our bedroom late that night.

An unnecessary alert—his evolution to a sensory warning system was superior to anything humans had yet developed.

The marine fog lights planted all around the house would throw off a clear image of anything approaching and send it right to Dolly’s tablet, making an audible ping! at the same time. We could carry the tablet around and set it up so that sound would wake us if we were asleep. Those weren’t “security” lights, just information—they worked even in daylight.

After dark, they watched for bad intentions—intruders experienced enough to mask off security cameras, moving with their eyes aimed down, to watch for trip wires or dry twigs. Their eyes would be hit by wheel-spinning high-lumen LEDs, intense enough to induce an epileptic seizure. Unlike the marine lights, these were hidden behind carbon mesh, so the blast would come as a stun-level surprise.

I didn’t know if the setup would work; there was nobody I could test it on. I’d learned about it from a man I served with. He told me he had the…disease, or whatever it is. He said flashing lights would set it off, but closing his eyes didn’t stop them once they got inside his brain. Years later, Dolly told me that man had a specific form of the disease: “photosensitive epilepsy” is what she called it.

Still, I turned around and went outside, just to be sure they were all working.

When I got back, Rascal’s snort had turned to outright sarcasm—his motion detectors never failed.

I slipped under the sheets without a ripple, but Dolly had her own detectors.

“What is it, Dell?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. I wasn’t going to try pretending around my woman, even if I’d thought there was one chance in a million I could get away with it.

“Someone from your…?”

“No.”

“From when you and Mack…?”

“No.”

“Dell…”

“It’s you, Dolly. Someone, some people…something, I don’t know. Tomorrow we’ll talk, okay?”

She put her head against my chest, listening for my heartbeat. My woman knew me as no other—I was too calm inside for her to believe I wasn’t waiting for the enemy to show itself.

—

The next morning, I tried to deflect what I knew would be coming.

Coming from Dolly, I mean. So I said, “Rascal’s getting fat, huh?”

“What!?” my wife snapped, deeply offended on her dog’s behalf. If I’d said that about her, she would have laughed. I remember hearing her answer one of the bolder girls, a while back. I hadn’t heard the question, but Dolly’s answer—“I don’t know, probably sixty-three, sixty-four kilos”—was enough.

“Huh!” one of the other girls said, clearly surprised. Either at Dolly weighing somewhere around a hundred and forty pounds, or at her actually answering such a question, I couldn’t tell. Dolly claimed to be five foot five, but that was really stretching it. I wondered how surprised they would have been if she told them she was the same size she’d been for decades, but I opted for silence; if my wife wanted her girls to know something, she’d tell them herself.

“Well, just look at him, honey,” I said. “He snarfs treats all day long, polishes off his own food in the evening, then gets anything you leave on your plate.”

“So what? He gets plenty of exercise. Anyway, every time he goes to the vet, they weigh him. Everything goes onto his chart. They store it online, so I can log in anytime I want to check on something, like medications I might want to try. Dr. Jay set it up that way so if Rascal goes to a specialist they’ll have instant access to his whole history.”

Not his whole history, I thought. They call a dog like Rascal a “rescue.” That word would fit me just as well. Aloud, I said, “So I could just dial up his weight chart, then?”

“You could,” she said, grinning at me, “if you had the password.”

I was out the door before she could start asking the questions I knew I’d have to answer sooner or later. If there was going to be a test, I wanted to do as much last-minute cramming as I could.

Or find a way to cheat.

—

Mack was waiting for me at the bottom of the gentle rise our property sits on.

I’d texted him while Dolly was taking a shower. With me walking out of the house like I had, Dolly would think I was close by, as long as she didn’t hear her battered Subaru or our “licensed for farm use only” Jeep start up. She knew I could get my motorcycle out of its slot behind the wall of the garage without making a sound, but she also knew I only brought it out after dark. And started its engine only when I’d coasted down to near the bottom of the hill.

“What’s up?” Mack asked, as I closed the door of his rust bucket, a battered compact something so not worth stealing that he’d never replaced a missing rear window. The sheet of heavy plastic duct-taped over it kept the rain out, and any potential thief could see there wasn’t even a radio in the empty slot.

“I should be asking you that,” I deflected his question. “How come this thing’s so clean inside all of a sudden?”

“Bridgette and me, we’re married now. So we only need one place to live.”

That wasn’t news to me. The only question I’d ever heard Dolly ask Mack was “Bridgette, as in Bardot?” And his answer, “That’s kind of the way it’s spelled, but you say it like ‘Bridget.’ She’s Irish…some part of her, anyway.”

Dolly was especially proud of helping him find their engagement ring, some big chunky thing, with a flat-topped amethyst held in place by gold clasps. The pale-lilac stone was inlaid with what she called a “Rose of Sharon,” gold-leafed, with a tiny dot of diamond in its center. The first time I saw it, I had to take a deep breath. I knew, even if I couldn’t say how I knew, that the woman who had been waiting for Patrice would still be wearing such a ring.

Dolly had flown out to Chicago for the wedding. I knew she greatly preferred Mack married—no more of his “distracting” her girls every time he came over. And she was crazy about Bridgette. What I didn’t tell Mack: their mortgage bank was Dolly. Bridgette knew, and she handled the money for both of them, so she just transferred money into Dolly’s account every month.

“You let her drive this thing?”

“She rides in it sometimes,” he said, almost as defensive about his car as Dolly had been about Rascal’s weight.

“I get it,” I told him.

“So—where, then?”

“Down by the tanks.”

“Where they’re building that…?”

“Yeah. But we’re going past that spot, maybe a mile or so. I’ll tell you where to pull over.”

—

“Why’d you want me to leave Minnie at home?”

“She’s a fine dog for your work,” I told Mack. “But, as well trained as she is, she’s still a pit bull, and where we’re going, people let their dogs run free all the time. One of them could get stupid.”

“So it’s your work, then?”

“Not like last time,” I told the social worker whose caseload was the “homeless by choice” population the town’s liberal majority tolerated…so long as they didn’t interfere with business. And they were happy to pay Mack to cover the seriously disturbed, who sometimes didn’t know what planet they were on—it was a hell of a lot cheaper than hospitalizing them. Plus, he was the one the jail called when a prisoner started talking suicide…or when they’d just finished cutting down a body and it was still breathing.

Mack’s work was funded by the town—although I knew they got some federal money for the “services” he provided. Probably made a profit off it, too.

That “last time” ended with a few people dead, and a new client for Mack—a client I never asked about.

“Just want to take a look around a few spots.”

“You’re a million times better at…surveillance, or whatever you want to call it, than I’ll ever be,” the social worker asked. “What do you need me for, then?”

“Camouflage,” I told him.

—

“You’re looking for a runaway,” I said, explaining Mack’s role to him.

“I wouldn’t be called in on a—”

“Not a kid who ran from home. Or even from custody. This runaway, she’s a girl. Been spotted in one of those homeless camps you already have on your rounds. She’s your client, so you don’t have to answer anyone’s questions, right?”

“Nobody around here would even ask,” he said. A hard mask dropped over his face, changing his voice from his usual social worker’s neutral-flat to a lifelong outlaw’s “I’ve got nothing to say.” His right hand pulled a chain he wore around his neck. A trio of laminated badges came out, each one with his picture in the corner. I’d seen them before. Even the most suspicious cop could call any of the numbers on them, and the answer would back him off. Far off.

“You’ll be coming up on a stand of white birch on your left,” I told him. “Turn-in’s about two-tenths past. Do it slow—the road after that’s nothing but packed dirt.”

“I got it.”

I didn’t have to tell him to check his rearview mirror, or to turn in sedately. Mack was a man who learned from anything he did, and he’d done enough things with me to understand that people can’t talk about what they don’t know. Oh, they can, and plenty do. But it wouldn’t be the kind of information anyone else could use.

“In there,” I told him, pointing to the right, where heavy brush made a natural garage. “We’re going the rest of the way on foot.”

I was proud to see him back into the spot I’d shown him. He was ready when I pulled a roll of camo netting from my carryall. I handed him one end, and we snapped it out like a towel over sand at the beach.

The car became part of the scenery.

I started up the hill, Mack slightly behind my left shoulder. We walked less than fifty yards before stepping off the packed-earth road and into the forest.

—

The hill wasn’t that high, but its top was just right for what I needed.

Once Mack saw me pull out what he probably thought was a pair of binoculars, his breathing changed.

Not enough for most people to pick up on, but I’d been listening for it—his nose had been broken a few times and you could hear a faint whistle when he didn’t breathe through his mouth. For all Mack knew, I was setting up a sniper’s roost. That wouldn’t have come as a shock, or even have gotten him to ask questions—he’d seen me do things that had permanently changed the way he looked at the world.

We were up there for almost an hour. More than enough time for me to double-tap the laser range-finder with a built-in inclinometer that could compensate 60+/– a few times, and read off the numbers. The Bushnell Scout could be set for “bow” or “rifle,” but I wasn’t thinking about that kind of work.

Mack wrote down what I said, not pretending to understand things like “H-three-oh-five.” Not asking me, either.

I scanned a left-to-right circle, then reversed direction. The distances weren’t off by more than a couple of feet, but I wanted to be dead-sure, so I did the whole thing again. The numbers held.

The only surprise my scan turned up was a total absence of the “No Trespassing” signs you see tacked up on just about every plot of unfenced timber around here. Those weren’t meant for hikers, just for hunters. Stray rounds were always a danger to people who lived anywhere within range of a deer rifle.

At least they used to be, before an ecoterrorist had killed a pair of hunters who’d been waiting in a deer blind. The FBI profile said that the shooter was probably a white male, ex-military, most likely suffering from PTSD, and “moon-phase delusional.” Even with all that information, whoever was responsible was never brought to trial. Or even arrested.

We were back on the paved road in another twenty minutes. Mack dropped me off and went back to his work.

I walked up the long driveway to our cottage, ready to start mine.

—

As I walked in the back door, my eyes flicked over to the red circle Dolly had drawn around a spot on one of the terrain maps spread all over the butcher-block table.

The same area I’d just visited.

“What is it, Dell?” my wife asked, not even looking up from the papers she was marking in different colors. All her girls would use those same colors every time they were working on something together, but I didn’t know what each one stood for.

No point in saying, “Nothing.” It wouldn’t be an acceptable answer. My wife was a human barometer, at least where I was concerned—she knew when the weather was about to change.

“Who threatened you?” I said. I can’t sense the same things Dolly can, but when it came to death-math calculations, I could do quadratic equations in my head.

“Oh, that wasn’t a threat, Dell.” She made a brush-it-off gesture, not asking how I knew. “He just—”

“Who?”

Even Rascal growled.

“What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Just sit down, baby. I’ll get you some of my lemonade, and we can talk, yes?”

I didn’t answer her, but I did sit down. I pulled a strip of rawhide out of my field jacket and tossed it to Rascal. He ignored it, keeping his eyes on Dolly—the mutt wasn’t interested in a good chew any more than I was in a glass of lemonade.

—

“Benton,” Dolly said, handing me a heavy tumbler of iced lemonade. “He’s nothing. Not even a councilman,” she went on, the contempt in her voice clearly communicating what she thought of the group of people who supposedly made all the political decisions for the town we lived in.

There’s a mayor, too, but none of them really make decisions—they just follow orders. Around here, all of them usually run unopposed. When there’s an actual race, the good-for-garbage-wrapping “newspaper” is careful to print an equal number of letters supporting each candidate.

That’s probably the only reason anyone buys that paper anymore—to see their name in print. Or to clip coupons. Nobody reads that useless rag for news; for that, there’s a blog called Undercurrents. Whether people liked it or not, I didn’t know, but I did know it actually investigated whatever was going on. And that it had a reputation for no-bias digging.

I didn’t know what funded it. Undercurrents didn’t run advertising, gush over some moronic “wine festival,” or even print “comments,” the way most blogs did. Especially the ones that were replacing print newspapers all over America.

It’s only been running for a few years, but it’s built a reputation for sniffing out stories that prove true, even if nobody can figure who their sources are. Or where they get some of the photos they run.

I knew the answer to that last one. Mack had been working with a video ninja for quite some time. That was Mack’s work, not mine…which is why I never asked him about it.

When I first encountered that young man, he was an expert voyeur—his back-channel footage of girls fighting each other went viral very quickly. I’d needed his skills on the last thing I’d been forced into doing.

Forced by Dolly, although she’d had no idea she was forcing me into anything. Mack was her friend, not mine. I don’t have any friends, not like she does. But anything that might protect my wife in the future was of immeasurable value to me. She already owned everything of ours, and she’d never want for money. But protection, that was a legacy beyond price. And Mack was a lot younger than I was.

—

“Benton?”

“Dell, in this town, voting is a sham. You know it as well as I do. Just look under the ‘Vote for One’ box—there’s usually just one candidate listed. Even the DA’s such a frightened little twit that he spent a lot of money putting up signs urging people to reelect him when he ran unopposed.”

“I thought he quit.”

“He did. There was this truly dangerous beast charged with all kinds of crimes—kidnapping, rape, torture….But the girl, the victim, she was killed in a propane explosion just before the trial. And the DA wanted to drop the case! Without a live witness, he could actually lose, ver lâche!

“And that all might have gone unnoticed, but for two things: The girl was really liked by a lot of people—she worked on one of the fishing boats. Then Undercurrents got their hands on some in-house memos that showed him for what he—the DA, I mean—really was.

“He knew if the town drunk ran against him in the next election, he’d lose. Not just his job, but his government pension. You have to work—I’m not sure, maybe twenty-five years?—to lock that in at the max. So he took another government job, in another part of the state.”

“I thought people never voted here.”

“A lot of them don’t,” she said, disgusted with that lot. “Remember that Web site I showed you? Oh, it would be such a hassle to mail a ballot.”

“So?”

“So they don’t pay attention. Mack says that the only difference in corruption between Chicago and this town is that Chicago’s proud of theirs.”

“Dolly…”

“Dell, what he said, all Benton said, was…Well, it wasn’t even a warning, really.”

“What did he say?”

“Dell, stop that.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew what she wanted me to stop, but all I could control was my conduct, not my temperature. I felt the coldness spread through me. And welcomed it.

“It was, you know, roundabout. Like, my ‘people’—as if!” she interrupted herself to segue into that teenage-girl-speak without even realizing it—“shouldn’t run around half cocked, whatever that was supposed to mean.”

I didn’t say anything. In my world, “half cocked” would be “full stupid.” You either cock a weapon or you don’t; that “half cocked” nonsense is what they show people at shooting ranges. Just like racking the slide on a semi-auto after you’re inside a target’s house, the way they always do in movies.

“He had to be talking about that logging road,” Dolly said.

“Why would you and your girls care about that?”

“We don’t. It’s a lose-lose deal all around. Nobody wins…except maybe some lawyers who keep filing those ‘Environmental Impact Statement’ things. Or the insurance companies.”

“Geological surveyors?”

“They get paid once. And both sides are going to pay for plenty of those, anyway.”

“He found out who owns those parcels you’ve got marked off in red,” I said, pointing at some of the plat maps.

“I’m only one of the owners,” she shot back. “We’ve wanted to build a dog park out there for the longest time. One for real dogs. You know, like Rascal.”

“Rascal?”

“Rascal,” she said, in that dull-flat tone of voice she uses when anyone dares to so much as flirt with the idea that Rascal is one degree off perfection.

I retreated to silence. Dolly joined me in that, but she was still smoldering. Diversion was my best move, so…

“Then what’s that thick line between the water and the road? The pink one?”

“A corporation has been buying up that land for years. The only houses out there—well, trailers, really—they don’t get city water, and they can’t drill wells that close to the bay, so their places aren’t worth much. In fact, they don’t get any city services: no electricity at the curb to connect to, which is why even the cable companies don’t bother.”

“They all run off generators?”

“Pretty much,” she shrugged. “Propane can power just about anything. Heat, hot water, even barbecue grills. And they all have those satellite dishes for TV, so they’re pretty self-sufficient.”

“Some of them are still there?”

“That’s the thing, Dell. Not really many, not now. And Tova—you remember her, she’s in her second year of law school, but she comes home every summer—Tova says that if that strip of land was annexed by the town, they’d be entitled to city services, same as anyone else.”

“So what?”

“So some areas don’t want to be annexed. Some little town, about eighty miles north of here, it fought in the courts for years and years. It was a pretty exclusive area—I guess they wanted to keep it that way.”

“But it lost?”

“Yes.”

“So this corporation, you think it plans to build something?”

“That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense, Dell. What could it build? No condo would ever succeed along that strip. Who wants a place overlooking that sludge the bay vomits up, never mind smelling it? And with a logging road coming through, there’s no way anyone could get approval to build there, anyway.”

“But this Benton guy, he must have heard something, right?”

“Not from us. There was this piece in Undercurrents, though. That’s how we found out one single corporation was buying up all that property.”

“How you found out. So you weren’t their source?”

“Well…I guess I was. I mean, we had a message sent to them. Just an e-mail. We wanted people to start thinking about…You know, just like you said: why would one owner want that land? But I told you, this wasn’t like a formal meeting or anything. Benton just came up to me in the coffee shop.”

“Doing you a favor, huh?”

“That’s how he made it sound.”

“Okay.”

“Dell…”

“Don’t fuss, Dolly. I just need to find out some things. And, me, I won’t make any sound.”

—

I’m no private detective.

In a village like the one Dolly and I live in, the phone book is where you look for names and addresses. The little book even has a separate section for businesses. Every kind of business you could imagine, from boatbuilding to aroma therapy. Debt-collection agencies are listed, too—probably the closest thing to “investigators” around here.

I thought about that. Maybe there wasn’t much need for private detectives anywhere—not anymore, not with the Internet offering all kinds of services, from skip tracing to “background.” But local phone books will always exist, if only for advertising—a person looking for a lawyer will try the lawyer who took out the full-page ad first.

“It’s like your own Web site?” I asked, trying to understand.

“No,” Dolly said. “Your own Web site, it’s called a ‘domain’ for a reason. You actually own it. Which means you have to pay for it. First you register the name, then you pay to keep the name. There’s been a ton of lawsuits over people trying to use a celebrity’s name for themselves. Tova says there’s even a special court to decide who has the right to a domain name.”

“So this Facebook, the whole thing is one domain?”

“Sure.”

“Then nobody actually owns their own Facebook page?”

“What difference does that make?” one of her girls said. “It’s not like they charge you for having a Facebook page. It’s free.”

How would these kids understand jungle law? I thought. Nothing’s “for free.” And it’s only yours for as long as you can hold it. But I just shrugged, as if I had no answer to her question. Then I covered up by asking the girl, “Couldn’t people just make up whatever they wanted?”

“Well, of course,” she said, looking to the other girls for confirmation. “There’s a whole TV show about that.”

I just walked away before I asked any more stupid questions. I knew I’d never understand why all these people walked around glued to their cell phones, or texting madly about every tiny thing in their tiny lives, or carrying tablets so they’d be able to have a “conversation” with someone they didn’t even know.

Some of their phones could actually do all of that. Like Dolly said, they had to be “connected” all the time. When I asked her how they could be connected to people who maybe didn’t even exist, she gave me one of those Parisian shrugs that could mean anything, from “It doesn’t matter” to “Who cares?”

“What if someone stuck a GPS chip in those phones? They’d know every place anybody was, anytime they wanted to know.”

“They all have those chips, Dell.”

“But…”

“Oh, they don’t mind. And it’s supposed to be a safety feature.”

“Like if they’re injured? Or even kidnapped?”

“No.” My wife chuckled. “In case they lose their phone.”

—

A jungle doesn’t have to mean palm trees—it could be anything from a desert to a housing project.

A jungle is a place where your life is worth no more than your ability to protect it.

Even in this beautiful little village, jungle rules might apply—especially when privacy and self-protection were always at risk, thanks to the mania of some people to “stay connected.”

This seemed insane to me. When I was still a child, I learned one thing that would never change: all secrets have value…to someone, somewhere.

—

I’ve never been arrested.

I don’t ever expect to be. My fingerprints have never been taken, and the lump of scar tissue on my left wrist could look like anything from an industrial accident to a botched tattoo-removal.

In truth, that scar was from a branding iron. Yes, I’ve never been arrested. Not by the police. But I have been captured, and my captors knew mercenaries don’t take prisoners.

They liked their work so much they prolonged it. My screams excited them as a woman might excite a man. All it took was tolerating the pain a little longer than they thought I could. Passing out came easily to me, but not as easily as the confidence of my captors came to them.

One of them, I knew, would return on his own. And that his death would be noiseless.

Torture isn’t for information; it’s for enjoyment. That had been part of my early training with La Légion, that knowledge. Within that knowledge was the certain truth—no torture victim is ever allowed to outlive his value. When death is the only possible outcome of any encounter, the most valuable knowledge of all is that it doesn’t have to be your death.

I knew what Luc’s work had been after the Nazis occupied France. I always heard his voice in French—“Les Boches ont fait de certains d’entre nous des putains ou des assassins, à moins qu’ils n’aient fait que révéler ce que nous portions déjà en nous”—but it always turned to English, as if I knew his native language should never leave my mouth: “The Nazis made some of us into whores, and some into murderers…or maybe they just brought out what had always been within some of us.”

Dolly was quite a few years younger than me—a gap that seemed to widen every year. But she’d learned the truth of torture at a very young age, working in war zones where there were no sides, just enemies. Working with a rape bomb always attached to her belt, under her bloodstained white smock.

I don’t know why my mind went to that place as soon as I walked in our back door that afternoon. The big TV screen was showing the sentencing of some creature who had captured women and kept them prisoner for years. Usually, the sound was muted, because Dolly wanted to follow world events in real time, and most of the “news” stations had scrolls running along the bottom of the picture. But this time, the sound was on—I could hear some woman reciting the details of the horrors perpetrated upon her, as if what she said would affect the sentence the creature was about to receive.

Rascal could protect Dolly from a lot of people, but not once they had been allowed inside the house. That had happened, years before. Dolly never knew why that foul young man had been so “disturbed” that he’d blown himself up with a rudimentary pipe bomb he had been building in his bedroom. Some of her girls even cried when the news got out.

Dolly wouldn’t have expected tears from me. My wife had no respect for my knowledge in some areas of life—every not-for-work piece of clothing I owned was something she’d bought for me. But she knew I’d seen that young man in our house, more than once. She knew I’d lied, cheated, stolen, burned, killed. All in my past, but not erased from my skill set.

Dolly knew I didn’t do any of that work for fun. And she knew that if a roomful of people contained one person who might harm her, and I was short on time, blowing the whole place up would have been my solution.

I knew she was already kicking herself for just saying the name “Benton” to me.

—

There’s always more to any town than its image on a tourist’s postcard.

Who would advertise that the underbelly of their little village is no different from that of any big city? Clean air, pure water, no traffic congestion, friendly people, sights to see—that was the picture they wanted to paint.

But if you were tuned to the right frequencies, you’d know that picture wasn’t so much altered as it was selective—what it would never show was what every spot on this planet has in common: predators and prey.

I don’t mean “crime.” If you read the local newspaper, you’d be so confident of your own safety that you’d never close your windows or lock your doors. But nobody with functioning brain cells would confuse promotional swill with what Parisians would call reportage.

The collective who put Undercurrents on the Internet had built a reputation for telling the truth, and anyone who cared about “news” went there for it. That’s probably one of the reasons for its reputation: not just that it was free, but that it wouldn’t run ads or endorse candidates. “It doesn’t even demand you feed it cookies,” I once heard one of Dolly’s girls say, amazement in her voice.

Later, when I asked Dolly what that meant, she told me that all these “free” Web sites always got something in return, some little packet of information that was worth money to someone. “Data mining,” she called it. “Most kids are so used to it that they set their browsers to accept cookies and run Java scripts, so they don’t have to wait to log on to some site.”

I just nodded.

“Why are you asking me, Dell? I know you have…I mean, you know all about this stuff, don’t you?”

“Only secondhand,” I told her. And that was the truth: Once I’d answered his coded questions, the cyber-ghost who prowled through “secure” networks undetected had helped me many times. First, he told me I would be getting something in the mail.

Not mail at the house: I had to drive almost three hours to pick up a key hidden exactly where the instructions said it would be waiting. I used that key to open a box in a little post office that stayed open around the clock. Not to sell stamps or anything: the only part that stayed open was the area where the boxes were.

Inside that box was an envelope with four more keys. Each one opened a different box—the largest size they had—in that same place. When I was finished, I had four sealed packets, each bubble-wrapped inside one of those Priority Mail cardboard boxes.

Back in my basement, I put all five keys in my little hydraulic press, and waited until they were fused into a single lump. Careful work with a scalpel opened each of the boxes. The four pieces inside snapped together like one of those Lego sets, then became two halves. There was no way to make a mistake; every connector was color-coded. Still, I worked slowly and carefully.

When I was done, I had some kind of little computer. Besides a keyboard, it only had two buttons: an orange disk at top left, and a yellow one at bottom right. Like some kind of fax machine that could only dial one number.

The first time I pushed the orange disk, the screen lit up.

|<Ack>|

I typed in one letter.

|>Y<|

And hit the yellow button. The response was instant; the instruction explicit.

|<To use, snap pieces together. When finished, disconnect. Ack>|

As before, I just typed:

|>Y<|

Then I saw:

|<IP changes, both ends. Your local cable will always be final connect-send point, but untraceable–dead-ends in Estonia. Use only to ask questions and receive responses. Ack>|

I had to read that a couple of times before I understood that the ghost could send messages to me through our local cable network, but any attempt to trace the source of what I’d receive would be futile.

As soon as I typed in |>Y<| the little screen went dead.

I disassembled the machine. The fused-together post-office keys went into an acid bath. When it cooled, I pulled the container out of its housing by the handle. After dark, I put it into a channel I’d cut into a big rock in the woods behind our house, then poured metal-eating liquid over the whole thing.

—

I would never waste the ghost’s time on anything I could do for myself.

Apparently, this guy who’d said something to Dolly was considered a great catch for the village, a big fish they’d lured in. There’d been plenty of newspaper coverage a few years back. George B. (Byron) Benton was born in 1969, to John and Barbara Benton of Bethesda, Maryland. Graduated from Princeton 1988, then an M.B.A. at the Wharton School in 1990. Worked at Thackery & Associates in New York City until 1999, when he moved to Portland and founded PNW Upstream, a hedge fund.

According to the newspaper’s back files, he had a waterfront house on Lake Oswego—about as upscale as it gets—but he’d visited this place a few times and “fallen in love with life on the Coast.” Permanently relocated here in 2006.

The photograph they ran with the story wouldn’t be what he looked like today. A studio shot, white male, late thirties, stylish haircut, carefully trimmed mustache, very nice suit. Whatever he looked like now, he wouldn’t have that mustache—nobody around here wears one unless he also has a beard in a matching color.

All I could find out about Thackery & Associates was that it was an investment bank with a long, unsullied history. Never had to be “bailed out,” like some with bigger names.

Typing “PNW Upstream” and “Hedge Fund” into the search engine got me the simplest Web site imaginable—the equivalent of a listing in the phone book. But it confirmed the date it was opened, its managing director—Benton—and a street address in downtown Portland. There seemed to be no way to invest, or even to ask about investing.

That was as far as I could go on my own. I activated the machine in the basement, typed in everything I already knew, then:

|>Connect 2?<|

I didn’t know who the cyber-ghost was, much less what time zone he’d be sending from, so I never expected a message at any particular time, unless I asked for a reply ASAP. This time, I did.

—

The response was waiting an hour later, the info all loaded onto the little screen.

I copied it off as quickly as I could, knowing that I couldn’t leave the line “live” for long. And that as soon as I touched a single key, any key, the message would disappear.

|<Connect (verif, anon. sftwr contact ↔)>|

Then came a long list of names. A couple I recognized, most not. I tapped three keys:

|>Thx<|

…and watched the screen go blank before I took it apart.

Then I sat down and looked over the notes I’d taken. I knew that “verified” connections meant Benton had contacted all the names on that long list using some “anonymizer” program. That didn’t mean they were connected to each other, just to him. Not encrypted, just not easily traceable to any specific ISP.

I took my list upstairs and showed it to Dolly.

“This is a ‘Who’s Who’ of political power in the whole county,” she told me. “I can tell you that much without even going online. Some of the names I don’t know, but I’m guessing they’re heavyweights—not the kind of people who run for office, the kind who finance those runs.”

“Could you…?”

But Dolly was already banging keys on her laptop before I could finish asking her.

—

“Everything from dentists to architects,” Dolly said, pointing at the screen of her tablet.

“Some small fleet owners, a café—the big one, where they do those readings by local writers—even a bed-and-breakfast.”

“But they all have money?”

“I…guess so. I mean, to get on this list, it’s like joining a club. And the membership requirement would be either money or power.”

“Not the same?”

“I don’t think so, Dell. Not necessarily, anyway. Like, say, somebody could run for Town Council, that’s some power, sure. But if he was just a tool of people who put up the money to get him elected, and he had to do what they told him to…”

“How much?”

“How much?” she repeated my question, making it her own, to me.

“Money.”

“Oh. I guess that depends. This place, it’s like, I don’t know, in a permanent state of détente. There’s hard-core right-wingers, and there’s some just as committed to peace-and-love, even if they have to wage war to bring understanding to the unenlightened.”

“Fringes, then?”

“Fringes with overlap, Dell. If the liberals who write those ‘ban all guns’ letters to the paper don’t actually try and make that a law, the right-wingers content themselves with writing letters calling the liberals a bunch of wimps. Ignorant wimps. See?”

“No. I really don’t, Dolly. You’re saying…what? It’s like some argument in a bar where people call each other names but never throw a punch?”

“Sort of. The really rich people have more than one home—they only live here for part of the year. And the really poor people don’t vote. There’s some businesses that make money, but there’s just as many, maybe more, that are really just…hobbies, like. You know, those stores that sell used books, or the artist studios that don’t sell enough to pay the rent.”

“But even those, they depend on tourists?”

“Sure. That’s why they brought Mack out here. In fact, he’s a perfect example: The liberals say ‘homeless’ like it’s some sacred status, and the conservatives say it like they’re all a bunch of bums too lazy to work. Mack keeps track of them. The homeless. So he’s helping them and keeping them from making a scene outside any of the businesses at the same time. That pretty much sums up this place.”

“So you don’t need money to get into politics?”

“You need some money. Not much. Not unless you have an opponent, and most of the time, you don’t. That’s where the money comes in—making sure everyone knows who their candidate is. No point putting your own money against much bigger money.”

“So why would he say you shouldn’t be running around half cocked?”

“Who?”

“Benton, Dolly,” I said, very patiently. I was calm and soft-voiced, but my wife knows me better than anyone.

“Oh! I don’t know, actually. I mean, it was no secret that some corporation was buying up that whole strip of worthless land. Like I said, it was in—”

“Right. And you wanted to know—?”

“Those are public records, Dell. It isn’t like this corporation was trying to cover its tracks, anyway. The only thing people are wondering about it is why. And that’s just gossip, not some…investigation.”

“Not like whatever you and those girls have tacked up all over the place, then?”

“Dell, it’s nothing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t believe me!” she said, putting that little pout on her face that she knew always worked with me.

I pulled her onto my lap, put my arm around her, said words I know she loves to hear.

But I didn’t believe her, not for a second.

—

Rascal made a little growling sound.

Dolly hopped off my lap, just in time to open the back door for three girls. I knew there would be more of them on their way, so I went downstairs.

Buying up a tract of worthless land didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be what was underneath it, like that patch of dirt calling itself the Central African Republic where Hutu génocidaires might find more hospitality than in the Congo—provided they picked the winning side.

But I knew the Darkville Rules: When it comes to land, there’s no such thing as “worthless,” it’s only a question of what it’s worth to take it. Or keep it.

And whoever was buying up all the land knew that not hiding himself was a good way to hide his objective. A Judas goat never gets to make up his own mind, so you couldn’t call him a traitor. But the trick worked just the same.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that.

I knew there were ways for any Web site to collect information about anyone who clicked on it. Not a lot of information, probably. But maybe enough to finger Dolly as the instigator, working backward to the source. Maybe this was how Benton had known Dolly and her crew were poking around. Only I couldn’t see why Undercurrents would be cooperating with anyone seeking their sources.

Was he just guessing? Or carpet bombing, covering all the possibilities? Dolly said he hadn’t really warned her off. He was just being friendly, asking her to get all the facts before she made up her mind.

I didn’t believe that, either.

—

“There’s a way to tell if a hedge fund is open to the public?”

“Sure,” the lawyer answered. “Take me a minute.”

Ever since he’d won an acquittal for MaryLou in a trial that had all the elements for national news coverage—“Star Softball Pitcher in School Shooting!”—Bradley L. Swift occupied the top spot on the statewide criminal defense pyramid.

It had been an unwinnable case: MaryLou walked up to the high school’s heartthrob, shot him in the head, put down the pistol, and sat there waiting for the cops. But Swift had proved the “victim” had been the leader of a rape-initiation gang, targeting the school’s low-hanging fruit by sniffing out absence of self-esteem like predatory bloodhounds. And MaryLou had believed her little sister was next in line.

Dolly had used her local network to dig up some ugly truth; I’d used my past to put some heads up on stakes. The town had changed, and so had Swift.

“I’d appreciate that,” I said.

It didn’t even take that minute.

“No. In fact, it even says that the fund is currently oversubscribed—they won’t be open to new shareholders for at least another year after it declares earnings. And, so far, they show nothing but some minor expenses. Not exactly an encouragement.

“You could put yourself on an e-mail list, and they’ll notify you when they’re ready to sell more shares. If they ever are. I figured you wouldn’t want me doing that.”

“You were right. Thanks.”

“You…heard something?”

“No,” I told the lawyer. “Neither did you.”

—

Just one more set of questions for the ghost.

You can put all kinds of security on a Web site, but if anyone with higher skills than yours was looking, your security would be about as effective as trying to dam a river with barbed wire. So I opened up my little machine.

|>HF capital? Share ownership?<|

I didn’t expect an instant answer, so I disassembled the machine and went back to work on something I was building. I could feel Luc nodding his approval of my design…and that old man’s approval never came easy.

It looked just like a golf bag. But I could unsnap the top and pull another bag out from inside it. The outside bag was gaudy, red and white, with some big logo on it. The inside one was black and gray, in a blotchy pattern. In darkness it had the trick-the-eye quality of the best trompe l’oeil.

One pattern for transporting to and from the job, the other for actually doing it.

The bottom of the workbag was a spongy foam that would safely cushion even a piece of fragile glassware dropped into it. The inside walls were a series of Velcro flaps, set so I could cover the first thing I dropped in with another flap, and close it as firmly as I needed each time. The top of that first flap would be ready to silence the next thing dropped into the bag, and so on, all the way to the top.

I could carry a thirty-kilo load of loot with the shoulder strap, and the contents wouldn’t make a sound.

That would leave one arm free. And both hands.

—

“He followed her here. He says he’ll follow her no matter where she goes.”

“And she doesn’t want that?”

“Dell! Sometimes I don’t know what’s going on in your mind. Laura’s my friend. I was just telling you what she told me.”

“Why tell you in the first place?”

Dolly spun and walked away from me. I expected her usual three steps before she whirled and started in again, but I was wrong—it took four this time.

“I said she’s my friend. Friends tell each other things.”

“If she’s your friend, she knows you.”

“I just said—”

“I don’t mean know you like to say hello to, Dolly. I mean, if she’s a real friend, she knows you. Knows how you are inside.”

“You think Laura wants me to do something—is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know,” I said, throwing up my hands, palms out, to ward off whatever she was going to say next. “All I’m saying is, I don’t know how well she knows you.”

“And…”

“And that’s why I asked.”

“Asked what?”

“Dolly…Dolly, just sit down and listen for a minute. I know you really like Cordelia. I’m not saying anything against her. Or Laura. I’m just asking, how does this guy always manage to find Cordelia, every time?”

“You think she…No! She’s a beautician. Or a hair stylist. Or whatever it’s called. But, to do what she does, she has to have a license, okay? She has to register with the state. That’s public information. He doesn’t exactly need CIA connections to look it up.”

“How quick does he find her?”

“How quick?”

“Yeah. She’s been here, what, three, four years?”

“So?”

“So he’s been looking all this time, and now he’s found her?”

“Oh. Yes. That’s what happened. That’s why she only just told Laura about it.”

“There’s a law against that, right? Stalking, or something.”

“That’s only if he does something. He can watch her all he wants.”

“She has a Facebook page?”

“So—you do listen once in a while, huh?”

“Dolly…”

“No, she doesn’t have a Facebook page” was my wife’s tart response. “She isn’t in the phone book. She doesn’t even have a landline, just her cell. And she’s changed her e-mail address, too. More than once. But now that he’s found the place where she works, all he has to do is follow her home one night.”

“Sure. But what makes you think…?”

“He walked right into the place—they do men and women both, so it didn’t seem strange. The girl at the front pointed him to her station. Probably figured she was doing Cordy a favor—her chair was empty. He sat down and told her he wanted a haircut. She said she wasn’t cutting his hair. Ever. And you know what he did? He complained to the manager!”

“She shouldn’t have to—”

“Oh, she didn’t. I mean, the manager, Liz, she told the guy he wasn’t welcome in her place. She’s tough, Liz. We all went down to Legal Aid, but they said there was nothing we could do unless he had a record. A record of assaulting her, I mean. Or if she had some kind of Order of Protection.”

“Couldn’t she get one?”

“She tried. But the court they sent her to, they said she needed proof that she was in immediate danger.”

“Wasn’t she?”

“Not as far as they were concerned. When he beat her up the last time, that’s when she took off. All the times before that, she never reported him to the police. Now she would, but he’s not going to do that again.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“When he…when he beat her up, it was when they were living together. So that would be ‘domestic violence.’ The way I understand it is that the cops have to arrest someone when they’re called out on a case like that. Around here, the way they get around the law is, they arrest them both. That means the woman has to have her kids get picked up by CPS. If she has a dog, the dog has to go to a shelter. And even if they cut them both loose, it all depends on whose name is on the lease. Or who owns the house.”

“I didn’t know any of that.”

“Why would you, Dell? It’s not like you’re…I don’t know…‘interested’ in that kind of thing. But the cops, they’re supposed to be interested. Once they passed a law about ‘mandatory arrest,’ the cops use the threat of taking the woman in, too. As soon as they hear that, most women will forget about pressing charges.”

“They don’t live together anymore.”

“No. No, they don’t. But she—Cordy—she still gets the shakes even talking about it. He told her—before, I mean—he told her that if she ever tried to get away from him, he’d find her. And he did. He even sent her a letter last week.”

“Isn’t that enough to…?”

“No! It was just one of those stupid ‘Can’t we try again?’ cards you can buy in any store. It’s not against the law to ask someone who broke up with you to give you another chance.”

“How did she meet him?”

“Why does that matter?”

I just looked at her. She was close enough to touch by then, but I didn’t reach out my hand—I just waited.

“She used to live not far from Eugene. There was a poolroom close by. Not some dive, a very nice place. They even had leagues and everything. This man—Donny, everybody calls him—he’s very good. At pool, I mean. Won all kinds of trophies and stuff. That’s how he got to meet her. They ended up on the same team—looking back, she knows that wasn’t some accident—and they even won some league championship. The team, I’m talking about.”

“Huh!”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, honey. It’s just that he’s the kind of creep who follows women around. Not because he loves them, because nobody leaves him, right?”

“Yes.”

“So I was just curious how he got together with your friend.”

“Dell. Dell, I am serious now. I was not trying to get you involved with this. We’ll handle it.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Just me. And Laura. And Bridgette. He’s not going to threaten any of us.”

“Okay.”

She gave me one of her “I can see right through you” looks. Only she couldn’t. So it was like when one of those teenagers always around the house says, “Oh, my mother will kill me if she finds out.” That girl’s just amping it up—she doesn’t think for a minute that her mother’s going to take her life.

—

“What now?”

“Your wife.”

“Bridgette? Who…?”

“Nobody. Not yet, anyway. But my wife just had to go and tell her about her friend, Dolly’s friend, I mean, and Bridgette wants to trap this guy with—”

“Wait! Slow down. Just start from the beginning.”

So I told Mack everything Dolly had told me. Maybe amping it up just a little.

—

The house was dark, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

“There’s a nice spot just down the road,” I told Mack. “Drop me off there. Then go over to the poolroom. The fancy one, with all those colored tables. Here’s his photo. If you spot him, ring the number I gave you. Ring it once. Then move off and put the end of a lighted cigarette to the photo. One poof! and it’ll disappear.

“But keep watch. As soon as you see him move, push the number-seven button on this,” I told him, handing him a burner cell.

“Then what?”

“Then snap this piece of plastic crap in two, pull out its chip, and scatter the pieces on your way over to pick me up again.”

—

They take trophies.

This guy earned his, I guess. Sure had enough of them, scattered all over the front room of the house he lived in. A couple of them were heavy—glass crystal, etched with his name and whatever he got them for. I’d brought the bag because I didn’t want to make any noise as I dropped them all in, one after another.

Still no vibration from my phone, so I had time enough to find half a dozen different cue sticks, racked point-up on his bedroom wall like they were standing guard. They were really nice ones, the kind that you screw together. The one with the gold-inlaid butt-piece was by far the fanciest.

I took all but that one. And I still had enough of the padded cushions inside the golf bag so all I needed was a flat rock behind his house and a few cracks of my tomahawk to turn his fancy cue into fragments.

As I worked, my mind flashed to when I’d vowed to always carry that tomahawk with me in the field. Back to when I’d used it to fashion the crude crutch that got me to the field hospital where Dolly’s team had set up. I didn’t know it was there—all I knew was that I had to get as far away from the blast scene as I could. When I came around, there I was. And there was Dolly.

Maybe I was more superstitious than I’d ever admit.

As soon as I finished, I went back inside and scattered the cue shards all over his top sheet. Then I pulled the bedspread back over it.

It was almost three hours before my phone throbbed.

Mack was at the pickup spot way ahead of time, like I expected.

“What happened?” he asked, as I slid into the front seat.

“Tomorrow” is all I said.

I was back inside the house before Dolly. So I didn’t even have to bribe that mutt of hers into silence.

—

“This is a rule of life,” Olaf had once told me. “Any terrorist can be terrorized.”

“How do you know that?” I’d asked him.

“Physics” is all he said, as if that one word answered all the questions in the universe.

Maybe he was right. I’d never seen anything that contradicted him. So I was ready when Dolly dropped the question on me, just before I fell asleep. When you…Well, I guess I only know about me and Dolly, and she always called sex just another kind of communication between people who loved each other. “You can’t make love,” I’d heard her explain to a group of those girls once. “You can have sex if you get talked into it. To ‘prove’ your love, something like that, you know what I mean. But if you really love someone, and they love you, too, sex will show up all on its own. It’s like a play: if a character makes an entrance at the wrong time, it ruins the whole thing.”

“Put a ring on it, Tontay!” one of them cracked.

“Anyone can buy a ring,” Dolly shot back.

“You’re saying we should all be virgins—”

“I’m not saying anything like that.” Dolly turned to face the girl who’d been expecting a different answer. “All I’m saying is that sex isn’t love. People can have sex, but they’re not ‘making love,’ see? Virginity isn’t some medical thing. You can be first-time pure in your heart no matter what you did with your body before…”

She let the sentence trail off, settling over her girls like a comfort blanket over a baby.

None of them noticed me as I slipped past.

—

Later, I thought about what Dolly said.

And I realized she’d known I was there all the time. She was talking to me, too, not just to her girls.

So we waited until we…finished, and she was curled up inside my arm, before she said, “Donny left town.”

“Who?”

“Donny. The man who had been stalking Cordelia.”

“Oh. Maybe he was just passing through.”

“Stop it, baby. I don’t know what you did, but you made him go.”

“Me?”

“Oh, go to sleep,” my wife whispered.

—

I didn’t go far.

Those cursed woodpeckers. Not the red-topped kind in the cartoons. These were flickers—big birds, with a black patch on their throats and salmon-colored underwings.

They had a whole forest to bang away in. And I’d been good to them, too—I made a bunch of nesting boxes and stuck them up on square stakes of pressure-treated lumber, about eight feet off the ground. You’d think they’d be satisfied with all that. Not a chance. Some of them pounded on the bat houses, too.

Now, those I really cared about. Where Dolly and I live is a long way from where I’d been hit with malaria, but mosquitoes really spook me. Even standing water gives me the creeps. So I put together the bat houses very carefully. I followed all the instructions to the letter—even if the small opening wouldn’t keep some birds from nesting, the depth would. Then I applied coat after coat of flat-black, and fastened them to much higher stakes, with a three-piece sheet of green plastic riveted under the box to help keep the insides cool no matter what the daytime weather was.

And it worked. Sometimes you could hear the bats at night. Most of the time they were noiseless, but they gobbled every mosquito around. In the summer, the girls would always be asking Dolly how come her yard was never buggy. She’d tell them about the bats. Some did that “ee-you” thing. Bats were just so disgusting.

“You don’t have to play with them,” my wife would say. “They only come out at night, anyway. And if you like mosquitoes, there’s plenty of places where you can go and find all you want.”

But those damn flickers were relentless. I stood there and watched one of them hammer away at the sides of a bat house for ten minutes straight. Like he was drilling just for the hell of it—he’d never find a single bug inside that pressure-treated wood, but he just kept at it, anyway.

At first, I figured if it was okay with the bats it was okay with me. But one day I saw some of the green plastic dangling from its rivets. That’s when I realized that, if I wanted to keep things the way they were supposed to be, I had to be as relentless about maintenance as the flickers were about drilling.

There wasn’t any other option: I couldn’t exterminate the flickers without putting the whole place out of balance. I didn’t know what role they played, but I knew they were there first. The bats were the intruders, and I was the one responsible for bringing them in.

So, every couple of weeks or so, I made the rounds, checking on the bat houses. Most of the time, they were fine. When they weren’t, I used an aluminum ladder to get up high enough to put them right.

Every time I did that, I wondered if those damn flickers were watching, waiting their turn.

—

When I got back inside, I went down to my basement and assembled the machine.

|<1,000 shares @ US$5,000. Full as of 2011. Only investment activity, purchase 100% share of TrustUs, LLC. Cost $225K. Remainder still in Fund.>|

I hit |>Thx<| and unsnapped the two halves.

Five million dollars. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand to buy total ownership of that LLC. The other $4.7 million and change just sitting there, waiting for…what?

People with money always want more money. Some just gamble blindly; some think they’re getting inside info.

But this was tying up a lot of money, like putting greenbacks in Mason jars and burying them in the ground.

I could make guesses, but that’s all they’d be.

“Benton” kept running through my head.

I tried writing down some questions, but I had to make them precise. The cyber-ghost had no use for adjectives.

So I’d have to wait until Dolly was alone upstairs.

—

“How much land have they bought up, that LLC?”

Dolly didn’t bat an eye. “So far?”

“Yes.”

“Reach up and take down the plat map, Dell. The one with the strip running along the bay. It’s marked in orange….”

I brought the map over to where Dolly was sitting, laid it down in front of her, put a hand on her shoulder, and watched her uncapped gel pen as she traced it out for me.

“Starts here,” she said. “Looks like someone just made a random choice to buy that lot to give his single-wide a home, but it’s actually the borderline between our village and Bayside Bountiful.”

“What’s the—?”

“That unincorporated slice that runs all the way up through here,” Dolly said, anticipating my question, her fingernail tapping the point around a foot away from where the thin orange line started.

“It’s all these trailers? The ones that don’t get city services?”

“Except for this spot, right at the end. There’s nothing there, and it doesn’t look like there’s ever going to be.”

“I don’t get it. What’s all this got to do with your dog park?”

“I don’t know. Not yet,” she said, in that promise-threat voice that comes out of her mouth every time she smells a rat. “But we’re going to find out before this is over. There’s got to be a reason why one corporation would want all that land. And if a town votes that it wants to be annexed, and the town next to it wants that, too…well, it’s going to happen.”

“How can a corporation vote? I mean, you can’t own a town, can you?”

“I don’t know. But Tova says a corporation is just like a person when it comes to some things. So maybe there is a way.”

“You think it’s something like a trade? This ‘Bayside Bountiful’ place, if it becomes part of the town, it gets those services—electricity and all—but it’d also have to pay taxes.”

“Sure. But if it had all those services, then the land would be worth more, too. And that’s just it, Dell. Worth more to who? What good is electricity and water and garbage services and all that if you’re not going to build something?”

“That’s why we went to Undercurrents in the first place, honey. They’re famous for finding out stuff that nobody else does.”

“You mean that nobody else prints.”

“I guess that’s fair enough. But they’ve got all kinds of sources, in all kinds of places, and once it goes up on their blog, it’s a sure thing that everybody will know it. Maybe it’s not even fair to call it a blog—it’s more like a real newspaper than anything we have around here.”

“And they’ll keep digging?”

“Sure. They’re famous for that. It may be public record that this corporation is buying up that whole strip of land, but until they started asking questions about why anyone would do that—just like we’re doing here, you and me—lots of people wrote to them. Public letters that they’ve printed, not private messages like the one we sent them.”

“How do they know the difference?”

“The difference between…? Oh, okay, I see what you mean. Wait a second.”

Dolly’s tablet snapped into life. A color photo of the ocean, with the word “Undercurrents” throbbing below the surface. Dolly clicked on it, and a page opened up. It was the same image, but now it had buttons running from the lowest left up to the top, then all the way across and down the right side.

Across the top were buttons for topics, like “SPORTS” or “POLITICS.” The side buttons were smaller: “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR,” “OP-ED,” stuff like that.

Dolly tapped one of the buttons on her screen, and a whole bunch of conditions popped up. Like, if you wanted to write an op-ed piece, it had to be no more than twelve hundred words, and the author’s name and qualifications had to be displayed. For stuff like personals, they had some really clear warnings about not taking anything at face value, not being responsible for misrepresentations, even some legalese about “assumption of risk.”

At a spot somewhere below the ocean image was a blinking red light marked “CONFIDENTIAL” that opened into three different options:

Information—with a warning that anything you sent there was going to be checked out before it would be allowed.

Photos and Videos—with or without sound, but with the same warning.

Investigation and Issues—for people who wanted the blog itself to look into something. That last one was very clear: you had to send something that was in the public interest, not some private beef you had with a neighbor or anything like that.

“See the e-mail address for that section?” Dolly said. “It starts with ‘https://,’ not ‘http://,’ like most Web sites. So it goes to a secure server, and you don’t have to keep whatever address you send it from. Just send it, and nuke the address—it’s not like you’d be expecting an answer, anyway. Either they’ll start their own investigation or they won’t.”

“That’s the one you used?”

“Uh-huh. And even if they could finger the IP, it wouldn’t compromise us—Tova sent it from the public library in Fargo. I mean, she had her younger brother send it, actually—he’s a senior in high school.”

“I get it,” I told Dolly.

And I did. Benton was warning her off, but he’d been too oblique about it. Otherwise, she never would have mentioned it to me. And why pick Dolly? Even if he had someone in City Hall who told him she’d been in there checking records, that info would have been worthless on its own. No way any one clerk could keep an eye on everyone who came in to check for a building variance, or when some LLC went into business, or any of the thousand other reasons people would be using its public-access records.

And, like Dolly said, all those public records are online. She’d hit that CONFIDENTIAL button anyway, so how could Benton know who’d been asking questions about the land buys?

Benton was PNW Upstream’s boss. So he’d know that fund already owned TrustUs, LLC, which had been buying all that land…but there was no way he’d think Dolly knew it, too.

So I was left with this. Undercurrents had a lot going for it. A reputation for “pure” journalism—factual reporting, without bias—and total protection of all its sources. But any leak can reverse its flow, and the most trusted news source could get an infection, one that could turn fatal if it wasn’t treated.

There’s only one medicine that can stop the virus all traitors carry.

—

Undercurrents had always been about investigation, not self-promotion.

There was no masthead. No “staff roster,” no titles, no…nothing. I went back to my own poking around—asking the cyber-ghost to find out who owned the domain or anything like that would have been insulting the value of his time.

But the domain wasn’t even a dot-com; it was a dot-org, registered to TPE8YU, Inc. The contact person was Xiaun Constell, with an address somewhere on Nauru, and the phone/fax info was as blatantly phony as everything else. The area code for each was very different…and nonexistent.

They’d set it up so any attempt at incoming messaging was blocked, but they were very clear about the message their outgoing sent.

Still, there had to be at least one valid e-mail address to receive incoming. More than one, actually—how else could their editors get any given reporter’s story?

Maybe they’d never actually gotten together in the same place at the same time. But, “collective” or not, there had to be someone at the helm. Or the hub. No way they’d release anything without double-checking, and there had to be a way for X to send in a story, and Y to open it and decide which Z would be assigned to check it out, without notice to X.

Sure, X would know the story would be fact-checked, but wouldn’t know who Z was for any given submission. There wasn’t any other way they could protect themselves.

—

At some point—maybe past some point—everything you do is an act of faith.

Olaf had absolute faith in physics—a life spent testing it against all situations and substances had never revealed a single flaw.

I couldn’t trace my faith in the cyber-ghost back that far. I never knew for sure he’d even be at the other end when I contacted him. But, so far, that connection had held, unbroken, for years and years.

And he was all I had.

|>TPE8YU? Info, A&A?<|

“A&A” was “Any and All.” If the ghost couldn’t get past that first barrier, no point in asking any zoom-in questions.

Even for the ghost, it wouldn’t be an instant hit-back. So I had time to activate one of our “agency’s” local assets.

—

“What?”

“I need to talk with you. Say where and when.”

“Hour and fifteen minutes. Last place.”

When Mack’s car pulled in, his all-white pit bull jumped out of the passenger window and began slowly walking toward me. She would have kept walking, but Mack called out “Minnie! Friend!” and the dog instantly dropped into what most would see as a “sit” position. I saw it for what it was: launch mode.

When Mack got to his dog, he bent down and whispered something to her, then waved me over.

I didn’t waste time. Careful to make no sudden movements, I reached inside my jacket and handed over a copy of that newspaper photo of Benton.

“You might know someone who’s skilled at surveillance photography,” I said. “This is an old picture, probably a posed shot. It was copied from a newspaper, so it’s all grainy. Black-and-white, too. What we—the agency that gives us assignments, I’m saying—what it needs is a few fresh shots. As recent as possible. Color. Reference-scaled.”

“Why do we need this?” Mack said. He wasn’t asking an actual question; he wanted to know what story to tell the video ninja.

“We don’t. That’s why the shot has to include other people. No sneaking around this guy’s house, no night work, nothing like that.”

“He’s not comfortable enough to work daylight. Not yet.”

“You’re saying, it’s got to be dark?”

“Yeah,” Mack said, a little on the defensive. “But it doesn’t have to be the…the stuff he used to take pictures of.”

“Relax,” I told him. “There’s no way I want his assignment to be taking pictures of just one person, anyway. If anything happened to that person, it’d add up pretty quick.”

“Something’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Benton,” he said, staring down at the photo. “I never heard of—”

“He threatened Dolly.”

Mack’s face went stony. His dog made some low-in-the-throat noise, picking up on something, just not sure what.

When Mack said, “How many shots do we need?” he was dealing himself in. But before I could answer, he made it clear what he wasn’t dealing himself in for: “How many shots of different people, I mean. You know, photo or video?”

The first time I got Mack into some bad stuff, it was because Dolly wanted me to protect what was so important to him. So now he’s walking right in, to protect something that’s important to me.

—

Later:

|<Server in Finland. Top-level secure. Worldwide but separate-slotted. Reporters/anarchists/others. No cross-traffic. Incoming redirected. Single-access pickup.>|

I wasn’t going to insult the ghost by asking “Could you?” questions, so I hit keys quickly:

|>Local blog |||| Undercurrents |||| When started? Who pickup? How many senders? Arrival/departure date for all?<|

I knew the ghost would already have some of that info, so I waited.

|<Senders = 18. Pickup = 1. Opened 6/6/2002. Full list 48 hrs.>|

Undercurrents had been around even before Dolly and I moved to this village. So whoever was in charge now might not be the person who started it. That didn’t matter.

—

I’d been trained to do many things.

But that training was all depth, no width. So I knew a great deal of different ways to do the same thing. But outside that narrow band, I was ignorant.

When I was still a boy in years, but old enough for the recruiter to pass me along, he did almost all the talking. And the first officer to address us as a group echoed the truth of my life.

As all the instructors did at the beginning, they would use several languages. I only could understand part of the French, but I knew every word of the English.

“All of you who stand before me at this moment are ignorant. You know nothing of what you must learn if you are to survive what awaits you. To be ignorant is nothing to be ashamed of. Every man lacks knowledge of some things. No man has knowledge of all things.

“Here, we will teach all you need to know. But this teaching is all we can do. That is our job. Yours is to learn. And here is your first lesson: The line between ignorance and stupidity has nothing to do with intelligence. Not here. Not where you will be going. The line between ignorance and stupidity is the line between life and death. We cannot teach a stupid man. Why? Because a stupid man is a man who refuses to learn. A stupid man will soon be a dead man.

“That choice is yours. A choice you will have to make many, many times. So decide now. Pick the one path you will walk. Once you have made your choice, you have no option to change it. You need not tell us what choice you have made. That, you will show us.”

So I didn’t even know where to start. Or how to do it. Pictures of Benton would be good for one thing, but that one thing only.

Something connected to that forest land. That had to be what Dolly had sent in to Undercurrents. She was no investigator, either. So why not have those in the business of digging up facts do the work for her?

That’s when I knew who I had to talk to, and why I needed Mack to come along.

—

“It’s Spyros, the old man; he’s the one I have to talk to.”

“Okay.”

“So your job is to get Franklin away from wherever I get to do that. I know where they’re going to be working today, but I don’t know how close—how physically close—to each other they’re going to be.”

It’s not like Spyros is brain and Franklin is muscle. It’s true the old man knows all there is to know about trees and stuff. And it’s true that Franklin can throw boulders around like they’re hollow movie props. But the old man is as strong as hell. And Franklin, he never was stupid. Nobody bothered to try and teach him anything. Except for football stuff.

“I got it.”

—

Mack parked where the road ended, at the bottom of a long slope of trees. Near the top, that’s where they’d be working, I thought.

We could hear voices while we were still climbing. More than one. The closer we got, the clearer they became. I couldn’t make out the words, but I didn’t like the tone. I motioned Mack to move behind me. I couldn’t see if he signed anything to Minnie, but the white pit bull put herself between us.

“What d’you say, big man? You’re a cinch to win!”

A young man’s voice. Not one I recognized.

Another one: “Come on, stud. I mean, you like eating pie, right?”

One more: “Hey, maybe he’s never had any. You like the way good pie tastes, Franklin?”

“I don’t—”

Just as I stepped out to where they could all see me, Mack cut off whatever Franklin had been about to say with: “How would you know? The only way you’d ever get close to pussy would be at the animal shelter.”

Mack’s voice was flat and hard, the kind of hostile calm that scares people like them.

All three whirled. None of them liked the view.

“Who’re you guys supposed to be?” the first one said.

“I’m a friend of Franklin’s,” I told him. “A good friend. And this is a friend of mine”—quickly nodding my head toward where Mack was standing. “He wanted to meet Franklin, so I brought him with me. That’s a problem for you, maybe?”

“We never saw you before.”

“You don’t want to see us again,” Mack told him, very calm.

I watched their hands. Twitchy, but not ready to reach for anything.

Franklin opened his stance, but stayed as rooted as one of the trees he was working on. He wasn’t sure what to do, not yet. But I knew what he’d do if any of the three punks moved toward me, and I didn’t want that.

“Tough guy, huh?” their spokesman said. “I’m not fighting no pit bull.”

“Off!” Mack snapped out. Minnie hit the deck. Mack looked at the guy who’d been doing all the talking for the three of them, holding out two empty hands. “Feel better now?” he said, his voice as empty as a hollow-point slug.

“Look, we were just having some fun,” the spokesman said, turning to me, as if my age would make me more reasonable.

“Have it somewhere else,” I told him. “We don’t like people having your kind of fun.”

“We can do whatever—”

“Whatever isn’t the same as wherever,” I said.

“You own this property?” another of them whined. Not tough, looking for an excuse to go away.

“We’re standing on it,” I said.

“Mr. Dell, they weren’t doing anything,” Franklin finally said. “Really. They were just—”

“I know,” I assured the giant. Then I dropped my hands to my sides, stepped off to my right, and told the three punks, “We’re all done talking.”

Minnie was still flat on the ground, but she never took her eyes off them. Mack rotated his head on his neck. The audible crack! was as loud as a gunshot in the still air.

They all walked off, their leader muttering under his breath. Bullies need to save face, but this lot wasn’t stupid enough to make threats loud enough for us to hear.

—

“Gee, Mr. Dell, I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Actually, I’m looking for Spyros,” I said. “It was Mack who wanted to meet you, so I brought him along.”

“That’s a pretty little dog,” Franklin said. I didn’t see what gesture Mack made, but the white pit shot toward Franklin, leaping up at his chest. The giant caught her in the air, spun her around, and scratched her behind her right ear. “See, Mack! She likes me.”

“Of course she does, Franklin. She knows who likes her, too. You and me, you and me and Minnie, we’re going to be pals.”

“If you’re Mr. Dell’s friend, then you’re my friend, right?”

“Right,” I said over my shoulder as I was walking off. I didn’t look back, already punching Spyros’s number into my phone as I walked. He couldn’t be far away—I’d seen his truck parked next to Franklin’s before we started to climb.

—

He wasn’t.

“What?” came snarling through the earpiece of my cell.

“It’s Dell, sir. I wanted to consult you on something, and Dolly said you were working in this area, so…”

I’d said the magic word. The old man was waiting for me, sitting on a downed tree. His greeting didn’t change, though.

“What?”

“You know Sector 27? That chunk of land Dolly and her crew bought to build a dog park? Inside a much bigger one…303.”

“Do I know it? I was the one who told her it’d be perfect.”

“Something’s going on there. I don’t know what.”

“With the land?”

“Not that land. With the land along the strip, just across the road from it.”

“What could be going on there? All the trailers are gone, except for that one at the west edge. And that one—it’s a meth lab. Either the cops’ll find it, or it’ll blow up,” the old man said, making it clear that either result would suit him equally well.

“Some company’s been buying all that land. The strip, I mean.”

“So?”

“So Dolly and her girls traced it down. Then they let the paper know—”

“I didn’t see nothing in the—”

“Ah, I should have said this Internet thing. Undercurrents.”

“I don’t bother with that stuff.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I told the old man. “Here’s what does: When Dolly sent the info to them, they ran it. And now they’re doing their own investigation. The deal with them is that you can send something in—info, photographs, whatever—and they may run with it or not. But, either way, they’ll never tell anyone where it came from.”

The old man didn’t say anything; by then, he knew there had to be more.

“The guy who runs the group who bought all that land, he told Dolly to keep her nose out of it.”

“He told her?”

“Not those exact words. He made it sound like a friendly warning. ‘I hope you aren’t running around half cocked,’ something like that.”

“And you want to show him some land he might be interested in?” the old man asked, as subtle as a crowbar to the head.

“Me? I wouldn’t do anything like that. But I sure would like to figure out what’s so damn important about that strip.”

“Look, just because I like your wife doesn’t mean I lost my eyesight. So don’t play me for some brain-dead nursing-home case, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

He gave me a long look. Then he just nodded his head, as if we’d agreed on something. “I’m telling you, that strip ain’t good for—”

“I’m not arguing. But the land Dolly’s crew owns, it’s on the hillside that looks down toward the bay. The only thing it could be looking down at is that strip.”

The old man dry-washed his hands. Big hands, as dark and gnarled as the ancient trees he loved. “I told Dolly I’d be poking around over that way,” he said. “The only access is pretty rough now, and there’s no place to park. She knows her club would need to buy some more property to make it work.”

“I’d appreciate that, sir.”

“You were a soldier, am I right?”

I just looked at him.

“That ‘sir’ thing,” he said, “you didn’t learn good manners in no prep school, ‘respect for your elders’ crap. You don’t make noise when you walk. So I figure, you must’ve…”

I nodded. Let him take it any way he wanted.

—

“It’s better if you hold it like this.”

Franklin’s voice. He was showing Mack the best way to handle the lumberman’s ax he was using to reduce fallen dead-wood to chunks that could be moved away from the live roots they’d been impeding.

“This way?” Mack asked, swinging with his shoulders, not just his arms.

“That’s good,” Franklin encouraged him. “Mr. Spyros said we have to give those long roots more room.”

“Hey,” I said, so they’d know I was coming. I’d had to learn to do that—I’d once made Dolly nearly jump out of her jeans years ago. “You never made a sound,” she’d said, hands on hips like I’d done something wrong.

There wasn’t any point explaining that moving through brush like cigarette smoke through a mesh screen was ingrained in me. Too many years of training, too many years prowling hostile jungle—if they knew I was coming, they’d be waiting. Those times when fear was my most cherished friend. Now I always warn people I’m coming.

If I want them to know, I mean.

Franklin and Mack turned in my direction. Minnie was already looking, not making a sound herself, the tensed muscles twitching all along her hindquarters.

“Franklin’s going to come over and show me and Bridgette how we can make a better yard.”

“Franklin knows his stuff,” I said to Mack.

“You know who’s coming for a visit, Mr. Dell?” the big man burst out, unable to contain himself any longer.

“MaryLou?” I said. A safe guess—there wasn’t another person on this earth who could get Franklin so excited at the prospect of a visit.

“Yes! She’s got four weeks off. And now that I’ve got my own place, she wouldn’t have to—”

“Why don’t you bring her over for dinner?” Mack asked him.

“You and…you and your wife?”

“Sure.”

“I bet she’d love that,” the giant said. What he didn’t say was that MaryLou would love the idea of Franklin’s having a friend like Mack. The only other friend of his she knew about was me, and I wasn’t her favorite person. MaryLou knew what I could do, and she didn’t want Franklin learning any of it. Unlike most, she knew Franklin could learn all kinds of things.

“Then it’s done,” Mack said.

The giant bent down and patted Minnie’s shovel-shaped head. “MaryLou is going to love you, too,” he promised the pit.

—

“Just make sure she understands this isn’t some kind of…social-worker thing, okay?” I told Mack.

“MaryLou’s not that suspicious, Dell,” Dolly said.

“Not of you, honey.”

“You’re the one that’s suspicious of everyone,” my wife said. And I had no comeback—it was the truth.

“MaryLou knows I keep my promises” was the best I could do.

“Well, there you go. Isn’t that enough?”

“You’re probably right,” I lied. “Still, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just…”

“All right,” my woman said, as if giving in to a stubborn child. The truth is, she’s the stubborn one in our family. Once Dolly plants her feet, a steamroller would bounce off her. She didn’t know exactly why MaryLou was so confident that I’d keep my word, and it wasn’t something she needed to know.

—

I’d kept my promise to MaryLou when I tracked that pile of toxic waste to his new home in Denver.

He wasn’t calling himself Ryan Teller then. I don’t know what they put on his tombstone—or even if he got one.

So MaryLou believed that, when I said I’d do something, I would.

If she had so much as suggested that the boy she’d killed was “bothering” her, Franklin would have pulled his head off his body. But MaryLou was nothing like her foul little sister—she wouldn’t use people, especially a man she knew truly loved her. And she knew I was a different species—I wouldn’t care what I had to use to get something done.

MaryLou had come so close to throwing her life away on a psychopathic prodigy. Maybe that’s why she was so fiercely protective of the only person in her world that she knew would never betray her.

—

“When’re we gonna see some damn action?”

I didn’t know why that fool who spoke only the few words of French that La Légion required us to learn worked so hard at letting the rest of us know how eager he was to see combat. But even though I was still a very young man, I’d already learned enough to know he wasn’t broadcasting to any of us—he was convincing himself. Trying to, anyway.

“That’s not ours to decide,” Patrice told him, moving his head in the direction of the officers. His voice was low, but it carried.

Carried a message. More than one.

Idrissa shifted his body. Only a few inches, but it was a clear signal to those of us who knew him—not as a person, as a warrior.

The man so eager to see action wasn’t going to return from any mission we were sent on. Not because he would act foolishly in combat, endangering the rest of us. He’d never see combat—he wasn’t going to survive the journey to reach the Blood Zone. How we explained his loss, that would be for later. But we could all see he was radioactive, glowing in the dark. Better if he was under the ground than walking it beside us.

In our work, there were no guarantees, only empty promises. We knew the truth—we wouldn’t last any longer than the weakest of us did. We all knew that the best we could hope for was to increase our chances of survival. La Légion had its inflexible rules. We could all recite them by rote, but not a one of us would hold them higher than our own, single rule: do anything that might tip the odds in our favor.

So we always paid strict attention to scouting reports, but not necessarily so we could follow them. That would depend on what was known about the scout.

Some snakes are harmless, some are venomous. What we called a “carpet viper” is the same dirty-brown color as the trails we walked, and less than two feet long. But if one bites you, death is certain—its venom causes internal hemorrhaging. All the medics could do was to inject painkillers. A silenced bullet was kinder, and it preserved the meager supply of painkillers for the rest of us.

A python could be ten times the viper’s size, but not really dangerous—it wouldn’t attack anything the size of a man, and it couldn’t kill with a bite, anyway. So the rule was: any small snake, you kill it.

But it would be Idrissa’s blade doing that work, not my pistol. No silencer was ever as noiseless.

Too much patience can keep you silent forever.

I had to wait for the scouting reports to come back. But, in this zone, I trusted the scouts.

So it wasn’t impatience that made me put together the machine. But it was my training that made me disassemble it when I saw no message from the ghost.

—

I was trained to move from one world to another, and return as if I had never left. But when I wanted to stay in that new world, I’d had to learn new rules.

When you cross such a barrier, you must become what is expected each time—reentry is the most difficult phase. Sometimes, the barrier is so wide that you might have weeks, even months, to study, listen, learn…and blend. But when two worlds run parallel through your life, there’s no time at all—you are always a resident of both.

In one world, people will speak glowingly of a man who never breaks his word. A man with such a reputation can be trusted, whether to repair your car or to tell you what medications will prolong your life. You can even look up a reputation on the Internet. That such reputations can be purchased never occurs to the trusting.

“Trust” is situational. A reputation for always keeping your word is your only protection—it fills what otherwise might be taken as hollow threats with actual menace, and menace changes behavior. Whether that filling comes from honor, ego, or treachery doesn’t matter. Nor whether the threat is screamed, whispered, or unspoken.

Dead is dead. No difference whether the body rests in a mausoleum or is never found.

No difference to the dead man, sure. Not necessarily so to his killer. A “No Trespassing” sign could be a hollow threat. But a village surrounded by heads impaled on stakes sends the clearest of messages: only the skulls would eventually become hollow—never the threat.

—

I’ve known a lot of men whose students called them “sensei” or “sifu.” I’ve seen knife fighters up close, and snipers at a distance.

Combat covers all that, and more. But it always narrows down to this: pattern recognition and balance disruption.

In the field, you are both aggressor and defender—a balancing act with only a hand-held pole to keep you centered. When that same pole must be used to strike or to repel, its next move must counteract precisely or your median is lost. And you fall.

The mother bird who fakes an injured wing to draw predators away from her nestlings is acting on instinct. The soldier who deliberately changes the pattern the enemy expects—visual or audio—has been trained to draw predators closer.

You might lure an enemy squad into an ambush, but you wouldn’t call in an air strike on your own position.

Without information, patience is useless. You could be waiting for the enemy to walk across your trip wires, but if you don’t know what’s coming, you might be patiently waiting for your own death.

I’d never use my Dolly as bait. But if I asked her to call off whatever she was up to this time, I’d have to explain why…and I couldn’t.

I could ask her to just trust me, and I knew she would. But the next time? And the time after that?

I could spend the rest of my life behind layer after layer of protection, but Dolly couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. With her, those were the same thing. The life she’d dreamed of in this little village on the coast was a life of peace, not confinement.

Telling her to “be careful” would be like telling a screaming maniac to “calm down.”

I couldn’t pretend I was interested in attending those endless meetings she was always going to. And I couldn’t hang around the kitchen when her crew was working—that would spook them bad enough to leave, and then I’d be alone with Dolly. Alone with Dolly and her questions that I couldn’t answer.

So I got Mack to invite us over.

—

“Mr. Dell!” Franklin blurted out his surprise.

“He didn’t come alone,” Bridgette said, flashing her bright, confident smile.

“Dolly!”

“MaryLou,” Dolly said, ignoring Franklin as she pulled MaryLou’s head down to kiss her once on each cheek. She’d taught all her girls that French nonsense, but at least it wasn’t some phony air kiss—MaryLou wasn’t a girl you had to be delicate with.

My wife introduced the two other women to each other, leaving me and Mack and Franklin to do whatever we were supposed to do. I guessed that would be to sit down, so I did.

Bridgette didn’t make any big deal out of the cold cuts and greens she pulled out of the fridge. Dolly had brought along a big tote overflowing with fresh baguettes. MaryLou pulled one apart, scooped out the inside, slathered on something that looked like mustard, and stuffed it full before she handed it to Franklin. The giant blushed. Nobody noticed.

Bridgette and Dolly did pretty much the same…only they were already into their third bite before it dawned on me and Mack that we were on our own.

There was a pitcher on the table that looked like one of those cans you carry to the gas station, except it was glass. Franklin picked it up by the handle and filled everyone’s glass—MaryLou’s first, then all the way around until he got to himself. MaryLou gave him a wink…the only thing that made that weight tremble his wrist even slightly.

“Do you know a French toast, Dolly?” Franklin asked. But instead of answering the way she did her girls when one of them had asked the same question years ago—“Yeah. Maple syrup”—she said, “Sure I do: Mon ami”—she tipped her glass slightly toward each of us in turn—“ami des nôtres.”

No translation required.

—

“You know what you’ll be doing after graduation?” Dolly asked MaryLou.

The tall, rawboned young woman shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, I could try out for the Olympics—they’re supposed to be reinstating softball—but it might be a long time to wait. Maybe go after a master’s, then find someplace to coach.”

“You’d be great at it,” Dolly assured her. “When we used to watch games together on TV, everyone got an education just listening to you.”

“Probably have to take a course at finishing school first.” MaryLou smiled. “I don’t have the right style to handle pampered little princesses who worry more about their makeup than their stride.”

“If they didn’t listen to you, they’d be just…stupid,” Franklin said, stumbling a bit over the word that had been his unspoken middle name most of his life. Not always unspoken inside that house he was raised in. The only reason his drunken excuse for a father stopped beating on Franklin was that he didn’t need tea leaves to read his future if he didn’t.

MaryLou was supposed to be gay. I say “supposed to be” because that’s what she played herself as. All through school, the same way. Maybe it was a “You don’t like it, just make your move” thing, maybe it was just her way of keeping distance. But Franklin had saved a damn fortune to take her to the senior prom. And Dolly told me MaryLou never had a girlfriend.

Mack doesn’t give away much, but Bridgette was like a tough charm-school graduate who could send off messages with the smallest gesture. And all hers read the same: “Gay, straight, whatever, why would I give a damn?”

Even Minnie and Rascal seemed to get along. They weren’t pals—not yet, anyway—but as much as they loved to snatch chunks of roast beef out of the air, they didn’t fight over them.

“I know you don’t have smoking in your house,” I said, standing up and pulling a pack of cigarettes from my jacket. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Mack knew I didn’t smoke, but he’d seen me smoke when I needed to be someone else. And when MaryLou got up to follow me outside, Franklin’s face told me he wasn’t surprised. So, either he was a lot smarter than anyone thought, or MaryLou had gotten the message to him.

Maybe even both.

I walked a short ways off, far enough so that our voices wouldn’t carry. Then I fired up a smoke without offering one to MaryLou—she’d been an athlete since she was a child, and I wasn’t going to insult her intelligence.

“Franklin’s not going to get hurt,” I told her.

Her harsh face told me that I’d guessed right. And every word she spoke next underlined that. “Because you’re going to protect him?”

“I’m not going to use him,” I said, echoing what I knew was always in MaryLou’s mind when it came to the man who loved her.

“You could pass any lie-detector test, couldn’t you?” she said. It wasn’t a question—she was making sure I understood she wouldn’t believe anything I’d say.

“I’m not taking one. I haven’t lied to you, have I? About anything?”

“No, I’m not saying you have. But something’s…off about you. I don’t know what it is, but I know nothing’s going to get between you and what you want to do.”

“Need to do,” I said, underlining the difference.

“Yeah, I get that. But Franklin would do anything you asked him to do, ‘Mr. Dell,’ ” she half sneered. She wasn’t disrespecting Franklin’s trust, just warning me off.

“There’s no part for him.”

“Then what were you talking to Spyros about?”

“Nothing that you have to worry about.”

The tall girl with the pale-blue eyes turned to face me. I matched her stare, minus the warning.

“Tell me something,” she said, very softly. “If you thought Dolly was in danger, and you could protect her by killing Franklin, you’d just do that, wouldn’t you?”

“Him, you, anyone else.”

“Easy as that for you, huh?”

“Yes.”

“And if you were planning to do that, you’d lie to my face, right?”

“Yes.”

By then, I’d lit another cigarette. Just in case.

“You know I’m gay, don’t you?”

“No.”

“No?! You think, just because Franklin—”

“No, I think you played it like that because it was the only way you could be yourself in that school. You didn’t need a girlfriend, but you needed a way to make boys keep their distance. And a way to tell everyone to go fuck themselves if they didn’t like it.”

“I…I’m not sure what I was. Am, I mean. It’s not like boys would be beating down the walls to get at me, anyway.”

“Franklin would be a lot harder than any wall. And Franklin, he sees you beautiful.”

“ ‘Sees me beautiful’—what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that’s the way his eyes work: they connect to his heart. He loves you.”

“And I love him. But…”

“I’m not going to get him involved in any—”

“You want to know the truth?” she said, clasping her hands behind her, as if she was afraid she might do something stupid with them. “I’m a…I’m a virgin. I never much liked boys. Or girls, either.”

I didn’t say anything. I wished she was having this conversation with someone else.

“Franklin wants to marry me,” MaryLou said.

“He’s wanted to do that for a long time. But he wasn’t ready. In his mind, I mean. He’s only got his father for a model when it comes to being a husband. And he’d rather die than have you live like that piece of garbage made his wife live. But now he’s found something he’s good at. Real good at. He makes a nice living, too. And he’s got his own—”

“Damn!”

“What?”

“I can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Not what you think. I can’t come back here. Not after what…”

Her voice trailed away.

“It’s not the same place, MaryLou. There’s no trace of any of them left. Your so-called father moved out probably ten minutes after she took off. He can pick up his Disability check anywhere.”

I didn’t have to spell out “she” for her—MaryLou was never going to hear her baby sister’s name out of my mouth.

“It’s a paradise, now, this place?” she said, not sparing the sarcasm.

“No. And it’ll never be one. You believe in Paradise, go to church. You only have to remember one rule.”

“Rule?”

“Rule,” I repeated. “You can handle just about anything. But I know, if you hear some punk make a crack about Franklin, you’re going to throw down.”

“Be better than asking him to.”

“That can’t be your job,” I told her. “Franklin may be slow to pick things up. Some things. But once he does, he doesn’t drop them.”

“All through school—”

“I know. Punks said things. Boys and girls, both. But behind his back, not to his face. So he ends up with the same job you do.”

“You mean the ‘rule’ thing? Not to…?”

“Right. He’s got a little apartment, and he’s saving every dime, MaryLou. Just like he did for the prom. Only, this time, it’s for a house he’s going to build.”

“Oh!” She brought her big hands around to the front, clenching and unclenching.

“I would never use Franklin,” I said. Thinking, Not unless I had to.

She was silent.

“Dolly would kill me,” I said.

MaryLou’s smile was her own. I hadn’t seen it before. But now I could see a piece of that beauty Franklin had always seen.

—

It was well after midnight by the time we left.

“Hold my hand!” Dolly demanded, as we walked ahead of Franklin and MaryLou.

I didn’t ask why, just did it.

When we got back to our place, she explained it to me.

But it wasn’t the first thing she did.

—

Nothing from the cyber-ghost in the morning.

I didn’t know what time it was wherever he was, or even if it mattered…just so long as he knew it mattered to me.

That thought brought me up short. I was getting so lost in what I had to do when I encountered the target that I was in danger of not paying enough attention to how to get there.

More of La Légion’s training: Always approach with caution, but never with fear. Caution will protect you; recklessness will kill you. Fear will only paralyze you, but the result will be the same.

Dolly knew everyone in town, but asking for her help would tell her too much. I didn’t know anyone I could talk to that I hadn’t already asked, one way or another.

I don’t trust the Internet. Not because I was worried about some “hacker”—the ghost had a real-time monitor on all the lines going in or out of our property—but because I couldn’t rely on it. One person says…anything at all, I guess. Another person sees that, and writes an article that quotes the first person like he was some legitimate source. Then someone else refers to the article in what he writes. It keeps picking up speed, spinning around and around like a centrifuge, splattering what’s inside all over its walls.

Everything merges together. Digging core truth out of the mess that’s left, who could do that?

There may not be totally trustworthy truth in anything. It feels more and more like that all the time. But there are universal truths, and I’d learned many of them before I was even old enough to want a woman.

—

I realized I wasn’t seeking the whole truth, just looking for a path to a piece of it.

So I went to the library.

The reason people around here look at Undercurrents is that the newspaper prints only what it is told, not what it discovers. But I saw enough to see that Benton was an important man. A wealthy one, too.

What the newspaper also told me was that he was a homosexual. Not from this “reading between the lines” things people claim to be able to do, but from his own public statements. When he was interviewed for a “profile,” he’d been quite clear about that. Not only did he live with his “life partner,” he was a big supporter of same-sex marriage, and had donated considerable amounts to the effort to make it a federal law.

That hadn’t happened yet; it was still a state-by-state decision when that interview had been done. So he also contributed to the campaign to get the same benefits for a “life partner” as for a spouse: health insurance, Social Security, the right to inherit if one party died without a will.

“The way the law is written now is insane,” the paper quoted him. “A single gay man or a single lesbian can adopt a child. That is, a single half of a family unit. The other half of that family unit is going to do his or her share of parenting, from changing diapers to helping with homework. But if the parties ever decide to separate, for any reason, only the one whose name is on the certificate has any rights.

“He or she could even bar visitation with the child, and the courts would not intervene. Don’t we have enough children rotting away their lives in foster care, moved from place to place like furniture? Don’t they deserve parents?”

“Is that why you and your partner have never adopted?” the interviewer read her question from the sheet her editor would have told her not to deviate from—the one Benton would have memorized.

“No,” he had responded. “We intend to do so as soon as we can be legally married. And, yes, I know: we could simply drive up to Seattle. But we both believe this would be morally wrong. We live here, we expect to spend the rest of our lives here. And we would rather stand our ground and fight than run away.”

All the right words, in the right places. Most of those benefits he wanted made sense to me, but I had to read the parts about “the right to sue for wrongful death” and “loss of consortium” a couple of times before I felt I understood everything he was talking about.

When I did, I was even more grateful that Dolly had married me. She owns everything on paper, but until I read what Benton was fighting for, I never realized all the advantages. Not taxes—that wasn’t something that mattered. But I really liked thinking about how a plane crash or a drunken driver could put some money in my wife’s hands. It would be like I was leaving her something in a will I’d never write.

Benton was also a major backer of what the paper called “the arts.” Everything from bringing in authors from out of town to speak at the library, to the huge art center where they put on plays and had exhibits of paintings. Only residents could display their art: sculptures, blown-glass creations, all kinds of stuff. Each one with a price tag, in case anyone wanted to buy it.

Benton’s checkbook was always open, and always to the right page.

Everyone took it for granted that he didn’t have to work. Nobody seemed to resent that. In fact, just as the paper said, the town was proud a man like him had chosen our village as his home.

—

I’m usually someplace else when Dolly and her girls are working on their projects, even if “someplace else” is my basement.

But when I got back from the library, I had to navigate the whole gang of them. Dolly gave me a “keep walking” look. Rascal did a quick inspection to see if I had any rawhide to bribe him; when I didn’t, he walked over to where Dolly was sitting and stretched out at her feet.

I would have kept going all the way to the basement, but the voice of one of the girls cut through the separating wall like it was looking for me.

“Look! That evil little crowd, you see what they’re doing?”

“I don’t get it,” a young woman said. I recognized MaryLou’s harsh voice. I hadn’t seen her when I came through the kitchen, but I hadn’t been looking around. Anytime I had to come in while they were all doing something, I did it that way. Nothing dramatic, but enough to deliver the message: I wasn’t interested in checking them out so I wasn’t worth their attention.

“Are you for real?” another girl snapped. “Look at her Facebook page. Look! It wasn’t enough for them to post messages that she was a pig. And a slut who’d do anyone for free. Now they’re saying if she had any school spirit she’d hang herself—that’d make a great yearbook photo.”

“I saw it,” MaryLou answered. “What I don’t get is why she lets them do it.”

“How could she?” Dolly echoed MaryLou. “Can’t you, I don’t know, ‘un-friend’ someone? Or block them off your page?”

“That wouldn’t make a difference,” another girl said. “They’d just make up new names for themselves. They can tag her, too—every time her name gets typed in, it shows up on her page.”

“So why have a damn page?” MaryLou said. “What does she get out of it? Why would she even look at it?”

“Not have a Facebook page?” another girl said, as if such a thing were beyond imagination. “That’s like telling the world that you don’t have a single friend.”

“That’s pathetic,” MaryLou said, disdain coating her words. “But even if you’re that pitiful, why not just let it sit there? Why look at it all the damn time?”

The big room went silent.

Maybe none of them had an answer. Or all of them remembered that MaryLou was a killer. She might not have been convicted, but the boy she shot wasn’t coming back to complain about that.

There was a tentative little tap on the door, like whoever was there wasn’t sure they’d be welcome.

“What?” MaryLou’s voice—it sounded like she’d been taking elocution lessons from Spyros. I looked at the mirror I keep mounted in the corner before the hall to the basement steps. MaryLou was at the door. I couldn’t see who she was talking to.

“I wanted to talk to Dolly. I heard you could—”

“You ‘heard’?”

“It’s okay, MaryLou,” Dolly said.

As Mary Lou moved closer to me, a girl stepped gingerly past us. All I could see was that she was stringy-haired and fat—in youth culture, chum to always-circling sharks.

—

“They know me,” the girl said. “I don’t mean we’re friends or anything, but…I guess I think everyone knows me now.”

“I recognized your picture,” one of the girls said. “From Facebook. You’re—”

“Petunia,” the girl said, her voice already breaking around the edges. “You know, the one they all call ‘Tuna.’ ”

“That’s enough!” Dolly growled. Rascal growled, too. He couldn’t tell what was making Dolly angry, but, whatever it was, he was ready to nail it.

It was quiet for a couple of seconds.

“Come over here,” MaryLou said, her voice still hard, but a comforting kind of hard. “Sit down next to me.”

I heard some noises, people moving around.

“I don’t know what to do…,” the girl was saying as I turned away from the mirror and headed for my basement.

—

This time, the ghost was waiting. Not the ghost himself, just the trail signs he’d left before he vaporized.

When I assembled the machine, there it was:

|<Originator shielded, still active. Funnel system, wide at top, filters down, narrows to Originator. Any member: contribute, initiate fact-checking, internally contradict or oppose inclusion, but not a democracy—Originator sole controller of released content. Opened w/ 29 cleared for encryption. 2002 +3; 2003 <>; 2004 +9; 2004 +4/-5; 2006 +4; 2007 <>; 2008 +1; 2009 +1/-4; 2010 -20. 2011–2014 <>As of 1/2015, 22 currently cleared.>|

I moved quickly, eye-scrolling. Undercurrents had grown, but it wasn’t a linear process; some years, more members were removed than added. High was forty-five members in 2008, housecleaning started the next year; it had been pared down since then, and was now seven less than when started. No indication as to why members were removed or added.

It kind of felt like it was all young people to me, but if this “Originator” was an old-school investigative reporter, then maybe more like a classroom than a collective. A course you could take for life, and flunk out of at any time.

|>ID on 1 added 2009?<|

—

By the time I went back upstairs, everyone was gone, with only the glow of Dolly’s tablet breaking the darkness.

I sat down next to her, waiting for her face to stop scrunching from concentration. When it did, I asked her, “How do you get something to the people at Undercurrents?”

“Me, personally?”

“Isn’t it the same for everyone?”

“You mean, like, do I have a private contact there?”

“Yeah.”

“No, Dell. Remember what I showed you? You just tap Confidential, then Info or Investigations. Anyone can do it.”

“Do you have to give your own identity?”

“They don’t want you to do that.”

“But those…‘cookie’ things? Wouldn’t they…?”

“You don’t have to allow cookies. I told you—you can even run script blockers, or go through one of those anonymizer services. They don’t care.”

“Huh!” is all I said. I wasn’t any computer genius, but the ghost was way above anything most people could even imagine. And if he could get into their main server, he must be able to…

—

It only took me a few minutes to snap the machine back into place. Even less to ask the ghost what I thought I already knew the answer to.

|>Does using ‘confidential’ button to send info ID sender?<|

I climbed into the charcoal jumpsuit, grabbed my helmet and gloves, and went back upstairs.

“Won’t take long” is all I said to Dolly. She’d known from what I was wearing that I’d be wheeling my motorcycle out of the enclosed space behind the garage.

—

“Dell, is everything okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“It’s almost three in the morning, baby. You come up here, see me working, sit there, patient like you always are, ask me a couple of questions I’ve already answered, go back down to your basement, and now you’re going out?”

“There’s something I want to look at.”

Dolly gave me a look, but she didn’t say anything—she knows I don’t need daylight to see things.

—

I rolled the motorcycle to the road, made sure it was in neutral, and let it go. I had to brake it pretty hard as I neared the bottom of the hill. Then I unclenched my left hand to pop the clutch in second gear, sparking the bike to life.

It didn’t make much noise. It wasn’t fast, either. But it was good for what I wanted—no cop would give a rider wearing a helmet, faceplate, and gloves a second look.

I guess Benton could afford any house he wanted, especially around here. And no gated community would fit a man building the public profile he’d been working on. So it was easy enough to glide by and pick up some intel.

Good-sized house, but not a mansion. Three stories, down-sloping yard. Professionally landscaped by people who knew what they were doing. Not Spyros’s work. I couldn’t say how I knew that, but there was something missing—it was just too geometrically strict to have come under the old man’s touch.

There was a heavy-gauge wrought-iron fence all around the front of the house—black, with a touch of gilt around the more elaborate pieces. A wide driveway leading to a big garage, with what looked like a separate apartment above it.

No floodlights. No dogs, either—my headlight would have reflected in their eyes, and there was no barking noise. But that driveway was at least a hundred meters long, so maybe he had a more sophisticated system in place, closer in.

Circling behind, I could still see the top of the house, but that was all. On the back side, the slope was a lot steeper, and fully wooded.

That was enough for now. The ride had cleared my head. Focused it, too. I couldn’t go where I had to in daylight, so I’d have to wait a full twenty-four.

I couldn’t use Dolly’s ragged old Subaru without leaving her stranded. And worried.

But for my next trip I wouldn’t need a car; I’d need an alibi. So I pulled out my disposal cell, and went to work.

—

“What?” MaryLou’s raspy voice—I guess that was how she responded to any visitor, even one on the phone.

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“About what?” she said, telling me she knew who was calling. And that I hadn’t woken her up.

“Not on the phone.”

“Come to—”

“Can’t,” I cut her off. “Tomorrow, anytime past noon you say, anyplace you want. I only need about five minutes.”

“You know where I am. Ten in the morning.”

“Thanks,” I said. It was just a reflex—the dial tone was already sounding in my ear.

—

One more call.

“You’re up with the sun, right?”

“Sometimes still up,” Mack answered, telling me he was ready to move right away if that’s what was needed.

“Nine a.m. Earlier, if you have to be somewhere. But you need me to go along on one of your visits, which is why you’re picking me up at nine.”

I waited for the signal to tell me that Mack had disconnected. Then I wheeled the bike back home.

—

Whenever I had to return the bike to its nest, I always had the same poor choices.

I could gun it until I had enough momentum, then cut the engine and coast, but that would make more noise than I wanted. Or I could walk the bike up the hill. It wasn’t that heavy, and I’d done it before. But the risk was that some good citizen would see a man pushing a motorcycle, and stop to see if I needed help.

The street almost never got pedestrian traffic, unless you counted all the “Look at me! I’m working out!” joggers and speed walkers who come out with first light. They never came out at night—what was the good of dressing up if there was nobody to watch your performance? I was dressed for the shadows, and the bike was that dull gray that blended itself down to near-invisibility, day or night.

So I pushed it all the way. Took a while: I didn’t want to vary my pace, so I had to walk slow, letting my stride adapt to the steepness.

Dolly arched her eyebrows when I came in the back door, but she was too absorbed in some papers spread out on the table to ask questions.

Rascal was satisfied with the rawhide I tossed at him.

I went to our bedroom, put everything I’d been wearing into a blue drawstring bag, took a hot shower, and closed my eyes.

Kept them closed all the way to the bed. Dolly would do the lights-out check of the security when she was done.

I thought I’d be awake awhile, anyway. Lots to think about. Always is when I have to do something I’m not good at.

But my night-luminous wristwatch said it was almost six in the morning when the weight of Dolly on top of me woke me up.

After that, I didn’t have much to do but hold on. I remembered my hands on Dolly’s bottom, I remembered…

“Lazy bastard,” from Dolly, just as I drifted off to the cushion of her whispered chuckling.

—

When I came around, it was a couple of minutes past seven.

I found Dolly in the kitchen, but she wasn’t working on her project. She was working on breakfast.

“Perfect,” I said, after a bite of the omelet she’d slipped onto my stoneware plate right from the pan.

“Best you ever had, huh?” she said, winking to make sure I knew she wasn’t talking about food.

“Best anyone ever could have.”

That got me a kiss…and a little basket of croissants.

I sipped my white-grape juice as my wife bustled around doing whatever she does when she cooks. It was a moment of such sweetness that a familiar blanket dropped over my thoughts. If this Benton is a threat to my Dolly, he’s a threat to…everything. But until I know who the players are, I can’t cut into the game.

—

“Where’re we going?”

“Franklin’s house.”

“At this hour? He’ll be at work.”

“He’s not the one I need to speak to.”

“Got it.”

A few minutes later, Mack said, “I don’t know her. But I’ve met her. Maybe I could help…”

“Not with this,” I told him. “You’re going to drop me off a couple of blocks from where they’re staying. I don’t think it will take long, but you don’t want to wait around.”

“Why not? Where Franklin lives, that’s one spot where nobody would even look twice at my car—once they’re sure it’s a white man behind the wheel, that is.”

“You’re not wrong. But it’d be better if you drifted off. I’ll call you when I’m leaving, and you can pick me up two blocks north of here,” I said, pointing to make sure he knew the direction I meant.

—

MaryLou must have been watching for me—the door to the house popped open a crack as I was coming up the packed-dirt path.

I stepped inside, closed the door behind me. I’d been in Franklin’s place before, but it looked different, somehow.

“Find a seat,” MaryLou said.

I took a corner of the couch. She folded her long body into a lounge chair, but didn’t recline it.

“I need to borrow Franklin’s truck tonight.”

“Why didn’t you ask him?”

“I would. And he’d say ‘Sure.’ But he’d say something to you about it, and I wanted to get any worries out of your mind.”

“Meaning, you’re not going to be doing anything where Franklin’s plate number could cause trouble for him down the line?”

“Nothing,” I assured her. “But I don’t want Dolly to know where I’m going, so I can’t use our car.”

“I’m supposed to help you do something that—”

“—will protect Dolly,” I finished whatever she was going to say. “But I don’t know if the people I need to speak to will help me do that. And I wouldn’t want Dolly to—”

“—worry about it? The same way you wouldn’t want me to worry about what you might be up to in Franklin’s truck, right?”

I gently placed my right fist into my left palm and bowed slightly.

“I’ve got a better idea,” the suddenly falcon-faced young woman said.

—

Franklin’s pickup was a work vehicle.

No back seat, so MaryLou was kind of squeezed between us. But it never occurred to me to ask her if she wanted the window seat. I’d already given her the directions, right down to what the odometer should clock, so I closed my eyes and leaned my head back.

I could hear them talking, but I tuned out everything except the sound of it. When I felt the truck come to a gentle stop, I opened my eyes. We were at the beginning of what I knew was about a quarter-mile of driveway.

“I’ll call as soon as I’m done,” I said. To the both of them, I guess.

It was only a couple of minutes before I saw the lights in the house I was approaching.

—

Johnny opened the door.

“Where’s your car?” he asked, telling me they’d picked up on my approach way before I’d tapped the telegraph key mounted on a block of dark wood they’d put together to make a doorbell.

“I got a ride,” I told him. “When I’m leaving, I’ll call to be picked up. No reason to bring strangers any closer to your home.”

“Why not give us a call first?” That was Martin, Johnny’s partner.

“Because you’d ask me why I wanted to talk to you, and I didn’t want to explain that over the phone.”

Johnny stepped to the side, ushering me in.

“You want something? Coffee? Tea? Cognac?”

“No, thanks. I just want to sit down with the two of you and ask a couple of questions.”

“No harm in asking,” Martin said, just in case I was thick enough to miss that they weren’t necessarily going to answer.

Their living room was probably bigger than our whole house. It didn’t matter what I thought of it—what I knew was that it was all put together the way they wanted.

I had only one card worth playing, and I wouldn’t get a second chance once I put it on the table, faceup. Before I could get fully centered, Johnny jumped the gun. “Dolly’s not with you? Is there anything…?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “For now, anyway.”

“What does that mean?” Martin asked, his tone somewhere between frightened and dangerous.

“It means that someone said something to her. Friendly-like, but—”

“But what?” Johnny cut me off.

“What he said was something like ‘I hope you’re not going to go running around half cocked.’ ”

“Dolly will do that,” Johnny said, smiling.

“Sure,” I said, holding his eyes. “But you know me. I’m not like Dolly, am I?”

“No, you’re not,” Johnny said, dropping the smile. He didn’t know me, not really. I’d been at their nursery quite a number of times, to pick up flowers for Dolly. Even a couple of trees, and other gardening stuff.

I knew I had better standing with Martin ever since I recognized the battered hulk in his garage as a Facel Vega. I think he was used to his partner’s making fun of his “project,” and there wasn’t a trace of meanness in the way Johnny said anything to him.

Besides, they both adored Dolly. Always greeted her with a kiss on each cheek. That might have looked affected to some people, but they wouldn’t be people that mattered.

And it didn’t matter to them what I was, or whatever I might have done. They knew she was safer with me in her life. How they knew that, I don’t know. I don’t even know how they decided I wasn’t interested in how they lived, but they acted just as sure of that, too.

I think I probably was prejudiced against homosexuals when I was younger. The only ones I ever ran across when I was a street kid in Paris were always asking the same question. Different words, but the same question: What would I do for a hot meal? Or a bottle of wine? Maybe a nice, warm place to live? Or they skipped right to money.

They scared me.

After Luc took me out of the gutter, I guess I never thought about men like that again. Not until I was a légionnaire. There was this big guy. Rhodesian. Called himself Hondo. Patrice had warned me about what this guy was. What he’d done to a couple of the weakest ones. If you were…raped—what else could it be called?—you couldn’t go to the officers. That could result in a number of outcomes, none of them good for you.

We set him up. It was easy. Patrice explained it to me. “Those kind, they’re all alike. And that makes them think the whole world is the same.”

“Homo guys, they think everyone’s a…?”

“No, lad. Men like him, what they think is, everyone lives under the same tent. If you’re strong enough, you can take what you want. If you’re not, people will take from you. There’s no middle; you’re one or the other. No,” he added, before I could even get the question out, “different people want different things. Sex, money, land—it doesn’t matter. You’ve seen that plenty of times yourself.

“Hell, you’re part of it. We all are, here. They pay us money for what? To take things they want. If they want land, we take that land for them. That means killing. Not a one of them would care if any of us wanted to rape a woman—even a little girl—those who’re left over after their men are either gone or dead.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“Ah, no man would do such things. But there’s plenty with the same equipment as us,” Patrice said, cupping his crotch to make sure I didn’t miss his point, “and they’d do…well, they’d do anything they thought they could get away with. And call themselves ‘men’ for doing it.

“And it’s not only us, I don’t want you to be thinking that. The savages, they do that all the time. It’s part of the way they fight their wars between themselves. A woman from one tribe, she gets pregnant by rape from a soldier of a different tribe, she’s got the enemy’s seed in her.

“We took a village once. When we went through it, we found a dead woman. Not dead from our bullets. She had a sharp stick…stuck inside her. You could see she was pregnant, from her belly, but she was all bloody down…down there. Probably tried to stab that baby inside her, so she’d never have to look at her own poison-blood child.”

“Mon dieu!”

“There’s no God in here, son. Or, if there is, he’s one blood-thirsty bastard. But who am I to talk? More than one priest held our weapons for us. When we came calling, they knew what we’d be out there doing. I never understood it, not really, not the way it’s told. Catholics being driven out by Ulstermen. Maybe so, but not for any…religious reason. We want the bloody Brits out; the Orangemen, they know what their fate would be without the Queen’s soldiers. Remember what I told you? About the curse of the Irish?”

“It’s not drink; it’s revenge.”

“Aye, that it is. A blood feud. Blood that will never stop flowing. You know why I joined this pack of misfits. Mickey was my mate, all the way back to when we were little ones. When they killed him, I had no path but to take vengeance. I won’t be able to go home for a good while.”

Hondo came up on us one night. Patrice told the big man he was finished. With me. For the time. He walked off. Hondo turned to watch him go, and I had my dagger deep into his right kidney before he realized I’d been holding it all along. Patrice had showed me how to darken the dagger. It was second nature to him—anything that might catch a glint of light had to be darkened. That’s why he’d told me to never wipe blood off the blade—dried, it was almost black.

The big man was already dying when Patrice ran over and hastened him along.

—

Any feelings I’d ever had about homosexuals being degenerates, or bent on rape, or cowards, they wouldn’t have survived my first work as a hired gun.

When I left the Legion after the five years you had to serve, I’d learned a lot about people, but I had only one skill. A cluster of skills, really. But only one market for them.

I signed on with a unit that was working jungle. The pay was much better, and the bosses didn’t think we were scum. Or, if they did, they kept it to themselves. We all need sleep just as much as we need food. We can only go so long without either. Bosses, that’s what we called them. We didn’t wear uniforms, and we didn’t salute. But we were all a vicious lot, and a boss who closed his eyes at night wanted to be able to open them the next day.

One of the men in my squad told us his name was Pinky. He went into great detail about how a certain place in his body had turned pink from being used so much. You could tell immediately that he hadn’t been used at all—anything anyone ever did to Pinky was by invitation.

He was a hefty man, but he moved like a poisonous snake. Smooth and silent. Pinky thought rifles were for cowards. He carried three pistols, one on each hip, the third in a shoulder holster. Another strap held the tube silencers. All of his pistols were the same. H&K, chambered for NATO rounds.

Pinky would get close. He’d drop two or three of the enemy before they realized they were under attack.

And I’d seen him standing, his back against a tree, dispensing death from each hand. No silencers then. Not much use in a firefight. The man was either fearless or seeking death—the way he fought, it was impossible to tell.

In the jungle, there’s a deep, powerful belief in magic. I don’t know what went through the mind of a hired rifleman at the sight of native boys wearing pink chiffon scarves, reeking of perfume, charging headlong into bullets. Despite dropping one of them after another, they would keep coming, as if the rifleman were playing some lunatic’s video game.

Their belief in magic would hit the rifleman as surely as his bullets hit those crazy boys.

When we all went our own ways after that job was done, Pinky was still alive. But not before he shot a guy named Abel. The man he shot had called him some kind of name. I didn’t hear anything but the cough of the shot. One shot.

Nobody did anything. Nobody said anything. This wasn’t La Légion. We had none of their lies controlling us, no orders to never abandon our wounded or our dead.

We just walked off, in different directions.

—

I learned a lot from Pinky.

From watching him, I mean. How he handled whatever came his way. Maybe he’d once wanted to prove something to himself, but, whatever that test might have been, he knew he’d passed it.

If Pinky asked you if you wanted to “put it where it’s nice and pink” and you shook your head, he would just shrug. And leave you alone. That was Pinky: he’d either leave you alone or leave you dead…and that was your choice.

Maybe what I had learned branded me in some invisible way. All I know is that Johnny and Martin accepted that I had no feelings about what they did, how they lived, or even how they came to be that way.

That last part was something I figured out for myself. It wasn’t a choice; it was in you or it wasn’t. Like being born with blond hair. You could dye your hair, but you’d still be blond underneath the covering.

I never had their feelings, but I realized that didn’t make me anything special. I loved Dolly, and it seemed I’d never had a choice about that, either.

—

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink?” Johnny asked. “I’m going to brew some tea for Martin and me anyway….”

“No, thank you.”

“All right,” he said. “Let’s just get to it, whatever it is.”

“Do you know anything about a man named Benton? That’s George B-as-in-Byron Benton. Hedge-fund guy. He started something called PNW Upstream in Portland. Mid-forties, looks a little younger, maybe. Moved to the village we—me and Dolly—the one we live in, about a dozen years ago.”

“Why do you ask?” Johnny said. Like he was just curious, not probing.

“He’s a danger to Dolly.”

“And you…?”

“Shut up, Johnny.” Martin sliced into whatever his partner was going to say. “You’re sure?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“Whatever you want, just say it.”

“I just did.”

“That’s all you want? Whatever we know about…him?”

“Yes.”

Johnny walked over and sat down next to Martin and put his hand on his partner’s arm, telling me he stood with Martin. All the way.

—

“We don’t know him,” Johnny said. “But we know him.”

“I’m sorry….”

“He’s a fraud,” Martin said, no emotion in his voice.

“He doesn’t really manage a hedge—?”

“He’s not gay,” Johnny said, making it clear he was telling me a fact, not expressing an opinion.

“Then why would…?”

“He’s an infiltrator,” Martin answered me, trying to speak a language he thought I’d understand. “Where you live—actually, all along the coast—it’s political suicide to be ‘homophobic.’ Or even not a liberal. You have to support the ‘arts,’ ” he went on, hitting that last word with a light acid bath. “You have to be eco-conscious; you have to recycle, you have to be a ‘Dem.’ You have to write letters to the editor, even if nobody reads that rag. And it goes without saying that you have to support ‘gay marriage.’ ” He didn’t spare the vitriol on that last phrase.

“Aren’t there plenty of…I don’t know, people who call everything they want ‘small government’? Like lowering property taxes, or being against abortion, or…?”

“Yes,” Johnny said. “No shortage. But Martin said ‘political.’ Which means you can leave out all the trailer trash—not my term—because, whether you’re white or Mexican, if you don’t have money, you don’t vote. Nobody runs for office as a Republican or Democrat at the local level—everybody’s ‘nonpartisan.’ Makes it a lot easier to control all the decision making. How many local Republicans do you think you’d find in Chicago?”

“Okay, but why the masquerade, then?”

“That’s a good question. But I can tell you this for sure: Martin and I had dinner with George and Roger—that’s the man he lives with—a couple of years ago, and they are not a couple. They may be partners, but not romantically. I don’t mean they gave it away by not camping it up—that’s not a test, that’s a personality.

“But when you’ve lived your whole life as we”—he pushed his shoulder against Martin’s—“have, you just can…feel some things. Especially between another couple. I’m not talking about some ‘gaydar’ nonsense. That’s a signal you deliberately send out, and theirs was the opposite: a cover-up. But I can tell you this. I can tell you this, for sure: those two are the first closeted fag-bashers I’ve ever met.”

“They hate…you? I mean, not you personally, but—”

“That’s right,” Martin said. Like he shouldn’t have to say any more than that.

“That’s a lot to go through, keeping your face on all the time,” I said. “They can’t be doing it just to fit in—it wouldn’t be worth it. You have any idea what this Benton could be planning?”

“Not now we don’t,” Johnny said, softly. “But you already said the magic words, Dell. And you can take this to the bank: we will.”

“That’s a bank that doesn’t draw interest,” Martin added, just in case I missed the point.

“I don’t want Dolly to know,” I said, just in case they had.

“Can you say why?” Martin asked.

“Yeah. Dolly’s no good at keeping emotions off her face. She’s already sorry she even told me what Benton said to her.”

“And if something were to—”

“That’s enough,” I told them both.

“We’re entitled to protect Dolly, too. We’re obligated to. You don’t say you love someone—and we do love her!—and not stand ready to prove it.”

“You already are,” I assured them. “There’s things you’re good at that I couldn’t ever learn to do. And there’s some things I’m good at. We’re each working our part of the job.”

“And what we don’t know won’t hurt us?” Johnny said, half sulking.

“It won’t hurt Dolly,” I answered, handing him a blank business card with a burner-cell number on the back. “Okay?”

We shook hands. All of us.

I believed them. And I knew they believed me.

Now I knew.

—

On the drive back, I kept thinking how most folks would think being gay was something you’d hide, not fake.

But, the more I thought about it, the better I understood—or, at least, thought I could understand—why MaryLou had played that role all through high school. And how Franklin could sense things even if he couldn’t spell them.

Dolly wasn’t home. I went right to the basement, snapped together the machine, and…Yes. While I’d been away, the ghost had visited.

|<(1) Confidential senders all ID’ed at their end. (2) Member added 2009 = R/N Rhonda Jayne Johnson. S/N changes, floating IP. DOB = 2/2/19A7. Contacts back-channel for PNW, ongoing. Approved for >< question-phase, check-out ><*only*. Grad O State U this year. Concentration: economics. Also: coaching athletics, empha soccer. Accept’d MA program.>|

Then a lengthy list of vitals, from birth certificate to transcript to address. And a photograph.

There was something off about the photograph, but I couldn’t put a name to it. I knew better than to try and print anything off the machine—it didn’t have a connector port, and any message would disappear within a minute or so after the ghost’s system would tell him I’d viewed it. I needed that time to copy off the information.

I did that. Then I stared at the photograph until the machine blinked off. I wouldn’t need a printout to keep the image in my head. The career Olaf had started me on had forced me to learn that skill. Being caught with weapons could always be explained. But a photo of the target, that would do its own talking. Whoever was in such a photograph was soon to be dead, and clients of professional assassins expected anonymity to be part of every contract.

Dolly wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t come to bed. Sometimes, I can’t sleep—not with film strips being pulled across the underside of my eyelids, forcing me to watch a slow-motion movie. Most of the time, I could follow the script. Could be something I’d done that I wasn’t proud of. Or something that had been done to me. I had to watch.

But a replay of whatever my life had been before the “retrograde amnesia” the doctors in that clinic had told me I already had when I was brought in—that had never come up on the screen. Still it could, I told myself. Maybe that veil would lift. Maybe I could learn…I don’t know what. Or even why I cared.

After a while—I don’t know how long I’d been there, and they wouldn’t tell me—I left. I always thought of it as “escaped,” but there really was no security, not even a fence. The drop from my window was cushioned by the soft, carefully tended grass. It was dark, but you could hear the shadows. Some of the other kids said those shadows were grown-ups who had been there for years and years, wandering the grounds after night came. I wasn’t afraid of shadows. Not afraid enough to remain caged, anyway.

From some place in Belgium to the gutters of Paris. A different kind of cold. A ravenous wind always blowing. Then Luc found me.

I used to think about what I’d do if ever I found that “clinic.” I knew things now that no child could ever know. I had skills no child could ever be taught. Tools no child could ever use. I could make whoever was in charge tell me whatever I wanted to know…if they knew it themselves.

I was good at that. One time, I was alone in a hotel’s penthouse suite with a man who owned the hotel, and a dozen more like it. He was rich enough to travel the world on his yacht; he kept private jets in different places, and employed a security force powerful enough to overthrow some small countries. I needed to know where and when a massive arms shipment was to be delivered. If he wouldn’t tell me, I’d put a venom-tipped round into his brain.

“You can’t be serious,” he said, not a hint of anxiety on his face or in his hands. “You kill me and you’ll never get out of here alive. And even if you managed that…You’re a professional—you have to know you’re already on video. You’d be hunted down sooner or later. Then you’d be boiled to death like a lobster.”

“I get the coordinates, or you get dead,” I said, just as calmly. I had good reason to be: A man who buys too much security never thinks that what he paid for, another could pay for as well. Pay much more—traitors don’t come cheap. That’s why my job was to get the information and pass it on over the sat-phone I had with me. Then put the rich man to sleep.

But the threat to kill him was a bluff. Dead, the traitor inside his organization would be of no more value to the people who had hired me.

“You can kill me, I suppose,” he said. “But you’d just be killing yourself, don’t you see that?”

“I won’t ask you again.”

“Didn’t you hear a word I said? Are you insane?”

“Not as long as the shot they gave me is still working,” I answered his question. “I kind of know what it is, some mixture of lithium and Thorazine, some other stuff, too, I think. But I don’t know the formula. Only they do. That’s why I have to do this. They’re the only ones who can keep the voices away, so I have to do what they say.”

My voice had already started to wobble, so I made a concentrated effort to separate my words. The rich man didn’t miss what he thought I was trying to hide.

“Please…” is all I could get out by then.

I could see inside his head just as he thought he could see inside mine. This man is a lunatic. A robot. What’s one arms shipment, anyway? Not worth my life.

He told me. I let him hear me speak it into the phone, my voice barely getting the words out.

And then I got out. But not before I put a flat metal box on his desk.

Even if that clinic still existed, even if I could find it, it was all so long ago. I could think of a hundred reasons why no records about me would still exist. And not a single one why they would.

—

I learned this very early in my life: all knowledge isn’t power.

I might know how to break into a fortress, but if I didn’t know where the fortress was…

So I knew a lot of things I’d probably never have a use for, but that didn’t mean I’d ever throw them out. A man I served with told us that New York cab drivers who were Sikhs would always be left-handed. Nobody had to ask him why that was so; he wasn’t drunk enough to fall over, but he’d had enough liquor to believe that we were all spellbound by his stories.

“See, all Sikhs have to carry this little curved knife in their turbans. It’s a religious thing with them. Now, all the cabs have these bulletproof shields behind the front seat. So you can’t do nothing from back there. What a robber does, he jumps out as soon as the cab stops, then he walks around to the driver’s window, holding out money, like he never saw the slot in the shield, see? The driver rolls down his window, and the robber pulls his piece. Or a razor, or whatever. Now, a Sikh, he’ll have his own blade out and a big rip in your arm before you can blink. But, see, that only works if his blade is on his left, ’cause that’s the side he’ll have closest to the window.”

I knew I’d probably never have a use for that, even if what the loose-mouth told us had been the truth.

“How come he didn’t have an accent?” I asked Olaf later. “He said he was from New York, but—”

“If he was from Brooklyn, or Queens, you would hear an accent. But if he was raised in Manhattan, his voice would sound the same as if he was raised in Chicago, or Cleveland. It’s not like being from Boston—that carries an accent that does not depend on what part of the city you grew up in.”

“Oh” is all I said. That was enough—it was usually what I said after Olaf told me something.

But that photograph…

—

“He says, if we give him an image that’s already online, he can find out a lot more.”

Mack, repeating what the video ninja told him.

The only image I had was in my head, not online. And, somehow, I knew even if that photo was online there wouldn’t be a match.

Something off, but I couldn’t feel my way through to it.

I knew her name, where she went to school. I’ve hunted down men with far less information.

But jungle law always came first. “It is not tracks that will give you away.” Part of Olaf’s legacy—he’d known he couldn’t tell me everything in the time he had left, so he’d focused on correcting mistakes before I made them.

“Even a fool knows not to leave trail signs after he has finished his work,” he said. “It is the entrance you must control. You already know about things like trip wires, land mines, deadfalls. That is not enough to protect you when you work outside this environment.

“When you hunt in a densely populated area, even your vibrations must be masked. Every question you ask sends out tremors—you cannot know how far they reach, but every pattern you disturb is a potential alert to your target.

“An alerted target may flee, or may lie in wait. It is never enough to move silently. You must be beyond quiet, beyond stealth. That means any job with a time limitation, you refuse.”

Around here, a Subaru is so common it wouldn’t be noticed. But if I told Dolly I needed to use her car too many times, she’d notice. Mack’s car was a generic, once—now it was so torn up that it might as well be flying a flag. Franklin would lend me his truck in a second, but the license plate would be a problem. Martin would lend me one of his rides, only none of them would work for what I had to do.

If I traveled without a car, it would take me longer. That wasn’t a problem. Longer to get there—so what? But not being able to leave quickly—that could keep me in a place I didn’t want to be.