He didn't like goodbyes. Not with her. Back from Scotland, nearly a week of hiking, sightseeing, drinking, and kayaking with Rippner's boss, John Carter, Carter's wife Claire, and the founder of the Highland feast, Fingal's Cave and haggis, coarse-ground oats, Ardbeg, and all, Claire's brother Richard, Rippner and Lisa Reisert parted at O'Hare.

Rippner hated it.

Not the display of affection: he contributed his half un-self-consciously, without embarrassment and with equal desperation. He held Lisa as tightly, he kissed her as deeply, as she did him. His expression, he was certain, mirrored hers as she walked off down the boarding ramp onto her connecting flight to Miami: weary, subdued, somewhat numb. No: he disliked the inefficiency of it, "it" being both the goodbye itself and the separation it heralded. They enjoyed one another's company; they more than enjoyed the sex they had. And now, if they were to continue as a "they," as an "us," they had to make do with the tools of separation. Text, e-mail. Long-distance masturbation, solo comfort, intimate fantasies murmured by phone. Awkward long messages on the answering machine. Why? he thought.

Before he'd ransomed his BMW from long-term parking, Why? had changed to No.

Option one, the first and monstrous, the unacceptable one: a message for her machine, to be waiting when she got home, paraphrased:

We can't do this. It won't work. The U.K. was fun, Lise, but we're done now. Have a nice life. Goodbye.

Option two: his company contacts in Miami who had ins in the real-estate market. He wasn't presumptuous enough to assume she would abandon her privacy in favor of moving in with him, or in favor of him moving in with her. Not yet. They were both too inured to living alone. But seeing her less than once a week was unthinkable. If he had a place in Miami, she would still have her own space; he would have his.

And they would be near enough to fuck (or screw, or make love, or simply cuddle: that quickly, with her, in her sure, certain, greedy, giving hands, so to say, his sexual horizons had broadened), or talk, or eat together, or work out together, or watch movies, or go out, whenever they damn well felt like it. Should they decide to move in together later, fine.

He'd had other women. They'd had him, too. He was in love with Lisa Reisert; consequently, "casual" was no longer good enough. That he could see her every day when he was stalking her, nearly three years ago, and see her only as a treat now was, in a word, unacceptable.

All this during the stop-start drive from O'Hare to his apartment, the silver 325i idling, patient and practical, in a dingy rain five degrees above freezing.

When he got in, he dropped his bags, re-set the locks, checked his messages-

I have to turn this off in a minute-

- Lisa's voice, beneath the ear-pop white noise of the pressurizing cabin-

- but I just wanted to say that I had a wonderful time, an incredible time, I love you, and I can't believe you won't be with me tonight. Talk to you soon. Goodbye, Jackson.

That was the last he heard from her.

#####

She didn't return his calls or respond to his e-mails; she sent no messages of her own. For the first three days, he assumed she was too busy at work, too tired from the all-too-real shock of re-adjusting to post-vacation life. On days four and five, he was out of town, on the West Coast, making life nasty, brutish, and short for a man running national defense secrets out of the country under the simple, lurid disguise of digital piracy.

When he got back to Chicago, that being on day six, she still hadn't called. He called her, and got her machine, and left a message every bit as awkward and unconvincingly casual as he feared it would be. He detested that fear, but he was becoming worried now, too.

And when he said "I love you, Lisa," he meant it.

#####

Three days after that, his concern was souring with the first inklings of anger.

#####

On day twelve, following his return from Washington, D.C., where he and John Carter met with officially nonexistent men in a nonexistent bunker three hundred feet beneath the swamp that was the nation's capital and discussed nonexistent secrect-service policy over a very real lunch that Rippner could hardly bring himself to eat, Rosemary Wheeler came for a visit.

When the bell rang, Rippner opened the door without first checking the foyer cam. He might have been killed then and there; he might have disarmed with extreme prejudice a Jehovah's Witness hawking salvation and cheaply printed palm-sized pamphlets.

She was nearly his height, black hair worn long and careless. A subtle bruising crossed the bridge of her fine-boned nose. She assessed him with serge-blue eyes and half a smile. "You look less than pleased, Jackson."

"The last time I saw you, you shot me."

"And the last time I saw you, you were dead." She brushed past him, entering; he stepped aside, shut the door. She didn't bother asking him how he'd risen from the dead, after she'd put a bullet in his heart in the British Museum nearly a month ago; he didn't patronize her by discussing the advantages of thin-panel Kevlar and blood packs. Surprises, sleight-of-hand, out-and-out obfuscation: all part of the job. Even for agents, like Wheeler, now working freelance. She took a tumbler from the cupboard, ice from the refrigerator freezer. Rippner followed her casually across the living area to the liquor cabinet flanking the entertainment center. Rosemary poured herself a generous shot of freshly imported Ardbeg. "Did you get the bill from the clinic?"

In London, roughly four minutes after Wheeler had inflicted on Rippner that magically non-fatal bullet wound, Lisa Reisert broke Rosemary's nose with a well-placed right. When the bill from Wheeler's plastic surgeon turned up in Rippner's mailbox, he paid it without question, with an even temper and a touch of a smile. Professional courtesy. And something Lisa needn't know.

If she would reply to his messages. If she would bother to call.

"The check is in the mail, Rosie." He looked at her new nose. Appraisingly, if cautiously. "I like it."

"Aside from the stippling, you mean. When it settles, it should be a little less Sandra Bullock, a little more Emily Blunt."

"Tell me, Rose. Seriously." Rippner crossed his arms against his chest, watched her sip without flinching that fiery Ardbeg. "London: I didn't remove anyone near and dear from your life, did I?"

Roland Mason, thief, sometimes-antiquities-dealer, shot and killed by a buyer he accidentally— with Rippner's help— tried to cheat. Wheeler shook her head, directing a cynical smile at the golden contents of her glass. "Hardly. We were business partners, Jackson; that's all. But speaking of which—" —and now the smile lost its bitterness, and it was angled his way— "— how's your love life? Long-distance relationships can be a bitch, can't they?"

The thought, again: I haven't been able to reach her. She hasn't called.

"Can be. But I'm working on it."

"Jackson—!" Frank surprise, in Wheeler's tone, in her eyes. "You're not serious-serious about her, are you? Joint banking account, a mortgage, white picket fence, rescue mutt, one-point-eight kids-?"

"You know that's not going to happen."

"Does she know it's not going to happen?"

"Jesus, Rosemary—"

"You can always adopt, Jackson. I took the sterilization bonus, too, you know. I've never regretted it, not for a second. I doubt you've regretted it, either. Something's wrong," she added, studying him over the rim of her glass. "Is everything peachy with Little Miss Pugnacious?"

"None of your business, Rosie; you know that."

"Oh, my God. She dumped you, didn't she?"

He held up the bottle of scotch. "One for the road—?"

"Why don't we both have one, and I'll stay the night?"

Rippner set the bottle down and went to the door. She followed him, casually, glass still in hand. "Or aren't you that hard up yet?"

"No."

She met his eyes as the palm of her free hand pressed itself to his groin, as she fondled him through his jeans. "Feels like 'yes' to me."

She kissed him. Lingeringly. Rippner didn't pull away, nor did he respond. Rosemary flinched with a chuckle as the blade of the knife suddenly in his right hand pricked the skin of her left side.

"Back to 'no,' are we?"

"We never left it." Rippner's eyes remained effortlessly cold, but he could feel restlessness in the muscles of his lips. He could see her noticing. Damn her. "Get out, Rosemary," he said.

She reined in her fondling hand. "It's okay, Jackson. I have a plane to catch anyway."

He couldn't help asking: "Where to—?"

She tapped the side of her bruised nose. Cautiously, Rippner noted. "State secret."

"Anyone we'll hear about on CNN—?"

"Not on the breaking news. Maybe on the scroll. Still, it pays the bills." She kissed him again. "The ones that aren't covered by a certain handsome benefactor. See you, Jack. Thanks for the drink."

She handed him the tumbler and left.

#####

The next day, he was underground— literally— in the company's Chicago office. Post-run, post-workout, working with his mentor, Bruce Kemp, shock-haired, fortyish, tall and rangy, one of the senior programmers. No field trips on the schedule, no data to steal, no hackers to rough up or kill. They were just coming back from a jaunt to a local coffee bar when Paul Miller, one of the top three in Information Services, caught up to them in one of the bunker-level hallways. Five floors down, radio-quiet, relatively bombproof.

Miller looked like he had a bomb of his own to drop. The overheads, low-watt though they were, sparked glints off his red hair. His nearly colorless eyes looked more sub-aquatic than usual in his pale face.

"Jackson—" He gave Kemp a slight, professional trace of a smile. "Mind if I steal him away for a minute, Bruce?"

"He's all yours." Kemp nodded, walked off with his half-quart of dark roast.

Rippner took a sip of his own coffee. "What's up, Paul?"

As Miller looked after Kemp's retreating back, a troubled frown descended on his face. "There's something you need to see," he said.

#####

"When you first surveilled Lisa Reisert— that was 2005, right?— Information Services plugged her picture into what was then the latest in facial-identification software—"

They were in Miller's office; Miller was sitting before his 24-inch Apple flat-panel, currently screen-saving a slow-motion fireball. Rippner, standing behind him, said: "Get to the point, Paul."

"Today I was checking the program's I.D. log. Usual torrent of garbage. Everyone's uploading now; everyone has the latest zillion-pixel cameras; all those millions of images, all razor-sharp: the program's going nuts trying to keep up—"

"And—?"

"And an hour ago the hit-log showed me this."

He nudged his wireless mouse; the fireball faded—

A file from an amateur porn site. Eight minutes long. A man and a woman, only the man's head was out of frame—

"Clever how those assholes manage that, isn't it—?" Miller muttered.

- naked buttocks, a muscular but beefy torso, body hair in dirty red bristles. The woman was doing to him and having done to her things that women do and have done to them on amateur porn sites. Much of it awkward, uncomfortable, mechanical, most of it humiliating—

Fucking my GF, the clip was labeled.

The GF was Lisa.

Miller was right. Image quality, even for amateurs, had improved a thousandfold in the last few years. The blemish below and to the right of Lisa's lower lip: right there. The skin tag centered on her throat, the freckle on her right shoulder: present and accounted for. The scar above her breast. Rippner felt his breath slowing.

"Who uploaded it?" he asked.

"Screen name: Erik the Viking. Four more clips available."

Eric Janssen. Rippner knew that torso. One of Lisa's co-managers at the Lux Atlantic. Two months ago, Rippner had nearly removed one of the man's kidneys, as part of a slightly less-than-friendly suggestion that Eric leave Lisa and her co-workers to enjoy a night out free of drunken molestation and general assholery.

He said, flatly: "This one: when?"

"Three days ago."

Rippner turned for the door. "Get me on the next flight to Miami, Paul."

"Jackson, whoa— Wait, you shouldn't— You can't just—"

But Rippner was already in the dim hallway, heading for the elevators while that eight-minute clip played on in his head.

#####

"One week, he doesn't call: he's a jerk," Cynthia said. "Two weeks, he doesn't call or write: he's an asshole."

"Incoming, Cynthia," Lisa Reisert murmured, as another group approached the desk. She was at the Lux, working reception, and beyond the spurts and outright runs of customers— tourists, a convention of law-enforcement personnel, the first surge of spring breakers (and, God, the potential nightmare brewing there)— weather was coming in. The pressure was dropping. She had a headache; she felt nauseous. She looked out at the shifting sea of luggage, rumpled clothes, and unsettled, impatient faces, and dizziness washed over her. She leaned against the desk, her head throbbing.

"Are you sure you don't want to go home? You're turning green." Cynthia's wide eyes managed to widen that much more. "Lisa, are you pregnant—?"

"No. Absolutely no." Lisa shook her head, and it felt as though someone were pushing heated ball-bearings through the veins beneath her scalp. "It's just the weather; I've been this way since I was a kid. There's a storm coming." She took a deep breath, straightened, met the eyes of the customer nearest the desk. A man, sandy-haired, stocky and short, in chinos and a green polo. The slight, unconscious swagger of someone accustomed to the weight of a service revolver at his hip. "Welcome to the Lux Atlantic," Lisa said, smiling.

That smile. The smile. The one that convinced everyone, even her, that everything was fine.

Even if Jackson hadn't called since their return from the U.K.

#####

That mob sorted, checked in, dispatched to the elevators and the carts of the bellhops, Lisa relaxed a bit. Cynthia had held her ground admirably, even facing the ostensible worst of the would-be frat-boy party-hounds. "We need to ask building services to step up installing those floor drains," she said, as the kids flip-flopped for the elevators, key-cards, cell phones, and duffels in hand. "We're gonna have to have those rooms hosed down."

If her aching head had permitted, Lisa might have chuckled. Still, she felt relieved: another rush survived. The computers were running slow, the weather front had fouled flight schedules all along the southern Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico, but it was nearly time to go home. To her right, his eyes on the monitor at his station, Cynthia's cohort on today's night shift, Eric Janssen, was shouldering against his ear the handset of his desk phone. "No, that's fine," he was saying. "So it's on? Good— Everything's all set on this end. See you soon. Bye."

He hung up, focused all of his attention on his monitor. Behind the lingering traces of her customer-service smile, Lisa frowned. That sounded almost like a personal call, Eric.

Cynthia looked at the wall clock behind the desk. "It's seven-fifteen, Lisa. Seriously: we can handle it. Go home."

"You're sure—?"

"You've been here over an hour longer than you should. Go home. Take some aspirin, lie down."

"Fall down, you mean," Eric said, passing behind them. "Seriously, Reisert: get out of here."

Unusual for Eric to be even that concerned. He and Lisa weren't on the best of terms. Still, Lisa split a smile between him and Cynthia. "Okay, I'm going. Good luck tonight."

She left the desk, fetched her purse from the back office. She checked in with Julie Weber in Security, Julie catching a break from her foot-rounds to watch the bank of video monitors and grab a quick iced coffee; she checked her messages. One from her dad, none from Jackson. Eric caught her just as she was about to go out the employee exit.

"I'm sorry, Reisert." He was practically hyperventilating. "Fourteen oh eight: they're bitching up a storm, and I can't get them to calm down. You're better at this than I am—"

Lisa ignored the backhand compliment; Eric wanted something, that was all, and she wasn't in the mood to have her backside kissed. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"Shit. Where do we start? They say they were promised HDTV. There's not enough booze in the mini-bar. The piano is out of tune— as if anyone actually plays those fucking pianos—"

"Fine, Eric, fine." She put her hand on his arm. "It's okay; I'll go up."

"I owe you, Reisert."

"You could start by calling me 'Lisa' sometime, Janssen."

#####

He followed her back to the desk. Cynthia was busy with the next influx of customers; she didn't see Lisa walk to the far bank of elevators.

Eric picked up the phone at his station, dialed a room code.

"She's on her way up," he said. He hung up. "Good evening," he said to the weary, middle-aged couple approaching the desk. He put on his best smile. Just like Reisert. "Welcome to the Lux Atlantic."

#####

Post-flight, outside the air-conditioned maze that was Miami International Airport, Jackson Rippner focused on his breathing.

The effect was like standing against a window at the top of the Sears Tower looking down, feeling the building give and sway in the wind, the heartflutter of vertigo. The barometric pressure had to be plummeting. The air itself was like a wet woolen blanket hung four clotheslines wide in the sun, hot and suffocating beneath an egg-carton sky. Lightning flashed against the bellies of the blackish-gray clouds, far out over the puckered slate ocean. The wind was blowing landward. Rippner, behind the wheel of a Hertz BMW Five-Series, feeling his blood pressure adjust to the air beyond his skin, tried to remember whether Florida was prone to tornadoes, or when hurricane season officially began.

He drove to her apartment building. He might have waited for her there. Inside. He still had the key she had given him, nearly two months back. He rang the buzzer for her apartment outside the security door instead. No response. He stepped out onto the sidewalk, turned, looked up at her windows, the glass reflecting the nearly black sky.

He might wait for her.

Instead, he got back into the BMW and drove to her hotel.

#####

The lobby of the Lux Atlantic was a zoo. Possibly the weather was delaying flights, messing with the hotel's servers: the scene was a practical riot of tourist groups, families, college-aged gangs, luggage, porters. Lisa wasn't at the desk. Cynthia was, red-haired and as deer-in-the-headlights as ever.

Eric Janssen was at the desk, too.

Neither of them saw him. Rippner turned to the right, toward the hotel's bar. His old routine when he'd stalked Lisa, that trio of years back, he found himself sliding into it: sit at the bar, scotch neat, half-facing the door, a perfect view of the lobby, all the while texting a friend he was to meet, maybe working the crossword in the New York Times—

"Mr. Rippner—?"

Rippner turned, found himself looking at a striking, poised blonde, medium height, trimly muscular beneath the tasteful blue pantsuit she wore. J. Weber, Security Services on her name tag. Julie from Grover's. That night out, before London, with Lisa and her co-workers. The night he'd nearly removed one of Eric Janssen's kidneys.

"Yes, Julie—?"

"You remember me." She frowned slightly, but she looked pleased, too. "Do you have a moment?"

"Certainly."

What he was there for could wait. A moment's pause: another moment to assess his feelings, his focus. He saw Julie's granite-gray eyes scan the lobby professionally, but without targeting. She wasn't signaling. The possibility existed that she was netting him, setting a trap, but there were no undercovers in the lobby, none that Rippner could see. Possibly, too, she simply wasn't insulting him. She'd sized him up; she obviously knew his capabilities. If there were police moving in, she knew he would know.

He passed behind her through a door to the right of the stairs leading to the Lux's main restaurant, followed her down a well-lit carpeted corridor. He platinum hair hung precisely pony-tailed between her shoulder blades. Almost as if it were weighted at the tips. He nearly marveled at the balance of her; he found himself fighting the urge to reach out, touch her shoulder, just to witness the lethality she could unleash.

She preceded him into the hotel's security office. A bank of video monitors in crisp black and white. Two chairs, one behind the room's one desk, another one opposite it. She didn't offer him either.

"I know who you are, Mr. Rippner," she said.

Rippner's back stiffened. He met her eyes; Julie didn't look away. She continued:

"I've known Lisa Reisert for five years. She's a good, honest employee of this hotel, and I consider her a friend. I trust her. Know, however, that while you are on these premises, Mr. Rippner, my staff and I will be keeping an eye on you."

She was being honest with him. Rippner could respect that. He reciprocated. "I've been trying to reach her, Julie. Do you know where I might find her?"

Those gray eyes on him. Not seeing the stalker he once was, the jealous lover he'd become. Nor the killer he'd always been. "She's gone home for the day," she said.

"Thanks. Is that all—?"

She nodded him out.

#####

It's over.

He'd been a fool. Worse: he'd nearly been a psychopathic fool. He'd try her apartment again, and then he'd catch the next flight home. A long, cold shower, a few hours' sleep, and piles of training tomorrow. He'd keep busy; he'd try not to think of her, not to wallow in delusion—

He was passing Reception, now crossing the lobby brazenly, openly. Cynthia had a faceful of grousing customers— it appeared as though the system had swallowed the reservations of four sixty-ish women— but Eric looked his way.

And in that moment, Rippner thought of that video clip, eight minutes long. Erik the Viking, headless on-screen. How easy to make the phrase "headless-for-real." Lisa he could let go, forgiveness being part of love, but Eric Janssen meant nothing to Rippner but loathing—

Eric was leaving the desk, coming toward him.

Rippner paused, his face neutral, his shoulders and torso relaxed in his dress shirt, the dark suit jacket in a fabric nearly light enough to withstand the blanketing heat outside. The two knives velcroed into the seams of that jacket, one on each side, polycarbonate blades slender and invisible to airline scanners.

"Hello— Jackson, isn't it?" Eric offered Rippner his hand and a smile as broad and fake as a billboard. "Will she be glad to see you—!"

"Who—?" His expression still neutral, Rippner accepted the handshake.

"Reisert, of course. She should be down any minute—"

"Security says she's gone home."

"No— My fault—" —and Eric's smile became sheepish. "She's smoothing feathers upstairs. One of the senior suites— fourteen oh eight, I think. Regular shitstorm: I couldn't handle it. She should be down any time now, though."

He glanced toward the desk, where a new batch of customers— in addition to Cynthia's pecking quartet— was coming to full swarm. "Oh, wow. I'd better— Excuse me. Good to see you, Jackson."

Rippner nodded. You're dead, he thought. He watched Eric rejoin Cynthia at the desk.

Then he walked to the far elevator bank, entered a car, and pressed the button for the fourteenth floor.

#####

####

No sound from behind the door. Fourteen oh eight, the suite from hell. Absolutely silent. Into the card reader, Rippner slotted his all-access Visa, his master-key. The locking light flashed green. He pressed the handle downward and entered.

She was buttoning her blouse. Soft auburn curls on off-white silk. Her back to him. Head bowed, her upper arms shaking. No doubt her hands were shaking, too.

"Hello, Lisa," he said.

She seemed to shrink in on herself. Her strong lean back, the clean line of her shoulders: all tightened. But she finished dressing before she turned around.

When she did, it was no longer the pressure dropping or one of the world's oldest cliches: the sight of her took his breath away. She was that beautiful. He'd been that worried; he'd missed her that much. For a second, he forgot all the ignored messages, thought there had to be an explanation for that video—

And then she asked, coldly: "What the fuck are you doing here, Jackson?"

Rippner took a deep, slow breath. Exhaled.

#####

He asked gently: "What happened, Lisa?"

"I woke up, Mr. Rippner." She kept her distance, but she met his eyes. As fearless as she'd ever been. "I woke up. I came to my senses. You're a loser, Jackson. A pathetic loser. You're a psychopathic, delusional stalker—"

"Fine. That's fine." He took one step, two, farther into the suite. As far as he could see, they were alone. A table lamp, a metal skeleton, modern and elegantly functional, lit the sitting room where they stood; in the bedroom to Rippner's right, the bulbs of both bedside lamps were glowing. The bed itself was unmade. "Stop with the name-calling. I haven't heard from you in two weeks. I've been worried. What happened, Lise—?"

"What could I possibly see in you?" Lightning froze Lisa in split-second silhouette against the floor-to-ceiling window at her back. A moment later, thunder shook the filtered glass. "What could any woman see in you? You've got nothing but your ego—"

"I'm trying to stay calm here."

"So lose it, Jackson. You treat me like a child or a possession. You're selfish, you're patronizing, you're shitty in bed—"

"And who— let me guess: Eric's better."

"Believe it or not, he is."

She held her ground as he came closer. Rippner felt a rigor-mortis twitch in the muscle of his left cheek. "He has more to offer, I suppose."

"A normal life? A career that doesn't involve killing people? Yes. And he's not—"

"Not what—?"

"Sterile."

"You know that for a fact. Right now, this very second, you know that."

"Yes."

She kept her eyes level as his strayed to her belly. A mere arm's length between them now. Rippner chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. His voice was toneless: "Your profile indicates you dislike children nearly as much as I do."

"I'm not a fucking profile, Jack."

The knuckles of his open left hand caught her across the face hard enough to knock her to the floor. He grabbed her by the hair, dragged her into the bedroom. He pinned her on her back on the rumpled bed, straddled her. He unsheathed a knife.

"I'd like to tell you it'll only hurt for a second."

She glared up at him through tear-filled eyes. Tears, autonomic, in response to pain, not fear. The blow might have stunned her, but even now she wasn't afraid of him. He loved her for that. She was panting beneath him. Lips parted, blood on her teeth.

"But you never lie," she said.

He cocked his head, his own lips twitching. Smirk or smile, undecided. Something she'd said to him just over a month ago, on a rainy night in London: he echoed it now. "I'm so damn bad at it, remember—?"

He blanketed her with his body. His torso in his suit jacket like a black wing spreading over her. He nuzzled her cheek, his lips close to her ear, and before she could struggle or bite he rammed the blade of the knife into her side.

Her eyes went wide. She gasped, first, sharply, in pain, then in disbelief: she could breathe death no more than she might breathe water. She was staring past Rippner's shoulder as he pushed up her skirt, as he unfastened his trousers.

#####

Rape and murder. Or murder and rape. She was still alive when he began. Her blood stained his shirt. Afterward, he nuzzled her neck. Dragged his incisors against the skin of her throat. He closed her eyes, kissed her eyelids, left then right, and sat up. He straightened and smoothed her skirt for her. Then he remained where he was, looking down at her face.

Breathing. His breath, alone, drawing and releasing the chill conditioned air.

#####

The temptation after committing a crime, any crime, not just a crime of violence, is to run. Rippner got off of Lisa, off of the bed, finished re-fastening his trousers as he entered the bathroom. He left the door open as he washed his hands. He took his time. The blood on his shirt wouldn't be noticeable under his jacket. Not in the time it would take him to reach his Hertz BMW on this stormy night, the first of the rain now hail-pelting the windows of the suite. His DNA was all over Lisa's body, on the bed, the tap, the towel. No matter. He was practically invisible now. Tomorrow he would no longer exist.

Leaving the bathroom, switching off the light (another meaningless trace of him, himself), he looked once more toward the bed, the body lying backflat there, and crossed to the door of the suite. As he touched the door handle, his phone trilled softly from the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

He paused, still looking toward the bedroom. As if she could be the one calling. Stay with me, Jackson.—

— a dozen nights in England, in Scotland, dizzy with pleasure, virtually blind with lust, safe and warm and happy—

He took his hand from the door handle, answered his phone. "Hello."

Hello, Mr. Rippner. A voice, vocoded; male or female, he couldn't tell—

You've made a terrible mistake.

#####