Ace In The Hole

12:00 NOON

Jack hadn't found Blaise on any of his intermittent searches, and he decided it was time to head for the hospital and tell Tachyon that Blaise was gone.

Hell. The kid would probably be right by his grandad's bedside.

Hartmann supporters were wandering about the Marriott lobby in various attitudes of inebriation or exhaustion. Yellow warning tape fluttered around the hole that Jack had driven into the floor. Jack saw the pert waitress he'd noticed before and gave her a wink. She grinned at him. He was sufficiently preoccupied with notions concerning the waitress that he didn't see Hiram until he almost tripped over the huge suitcase-almost a trunk-that the man had set next to him.

Hiram seemed as surprised as Jack. The big man's eyes were wide in alarm. Maybe the suitcase contained something valuable.

Hiram had a man with him, a thin joker with a little mustache and webs of skin over hollow eye sockets.

"Oh. Sorry." Jack stepped around the suitcase. He looked up at Hiram.

"Won't you be staying for the acceptance speech?"

"Ah. No. I've-uh-stayed longer in Atlanta than I meant to, anyway." Hiram's eyes gazed at Jack out of bruised sockets. He was a mess: his hair awry, his collar open to reveal the sore on his neck. Maybe he'd slept in his suit. He took Jack's arm and led him away, out of earshot of the thin joker. "Actually, I've been wanting to speak to you."

"I'd been hoping to see you, too." Jack ventured a smile. "I wanted to thank you for the other day. You maybe saved me from getting hurt, making me light that way."

"I'm glad I was able to be of assistance." Hiram glanced over his shoulder at the joker and gave a nervous smile. He turned back to Jack. "I wanted to tell you something," he said.

His tone sent a little warning signal down Jack's spine. Whatever was coming, Jack knew he didn't really want to hear it.

"Sure," he said.

"I wanted to say that I understand now," Hiram said. His voice was leaden. "That you were right when you said that you didn't know till you've been tested."

"Oh," said Jack. He didn't want to hear this confession. Whatever Jack was, whatever he'd done, he didn't want anyone else's sins rattling around in his own head. He had trouble enough coping with his own.

"When I was attacking you the other day," Hiram went on, "I was really attacking myself. I was trying to deny my own betrayals."

"Yeah." Jack just wanted Hiram and his soap opera to leave. What kind of betrayal could someone like Hiram pull olf, anyway? Buy second-rate cuts of veal for his restaurant?

Hiram looked at him, eyes bright, as if he was expecting some kind of wisdom from Jack, some way to handle this burden of self-knowledge. Jack didn't have much to give.

" You can't change the past, Hiram," Jack said. "You can maybe make the future a little better. We've done that, I think, with what we've done in the last week."

"Hiram." The joker was looking at them with his blank eye sockets. Jack had the uneasy feeling he was being scrutinized. "It's time to go."

"Yes. Of course." Hiram was panting for breath, as if the conversation had somehow exhausted him.

"See you around, maybe," Jack said.

Hiram turned without a word and headed back to pick up the suitcase. Either it held nothing, or Hiram had made it light.

A giddy wave of paranoia struck Jack at the sight of Hiram hefting the huge suitcase and heading for the big revolving doors. Suppose Blaise…

But no. The suitcase was big, Jack realized, but not big enough to hold a teenage boy.

The events of the last few days had made him jumpy.