The Zero

PART THREE. The Zero

“MR. REMY, ARE YOU AWAKE?” Interesting question. Technically he had to be awake, since he’d heard her ask it. And yet, if he really were awake, would she have to ask? Wouldn’t it be obvious? Maybe he’d dreamed the question. How had April described her grief – as a fever dream? A dream – that would help explain the gaps, and the general incongruity of life now – the cyclic repetition of events on cable news, waves of natural disasters, scientists announcing the same discoveries over and over (Planet X, dinosaur birds, cloning, certain genetic codes), the random daily shift of national allegiances, wildly famous people who no one could recall becoming famous, the sudden emergence and disappearance of epidemics, the declaration and dissolution of governments, cycles of scandal, confession, and rehabilitation, heated elections in which losers claimed victory and races were rerun in the same sequence, events that catapulted wildly out of control, like plagues of illogic… as if some faulty math had been introduced to all the equations, corrupting computer programs and causing specious arguments to build upon themselves, and sequential skips – snippets of songs sampled before their original release, movies remade before they came out the first time, victories claimed before wars were fought, drastic fluctuations in the security markets (panic giving way to calm giving way to panic giving way to calm giving way to panic), all of it narrated by fragments of speeches over staged photo ops accompanied by color-coded warnings and yellow ribbons on trees.

“Mr. Remy? Can you squeeze my hand?”

Another tough question. Was he supposed to answer or squeeze? Would a squeeze be an answer? What was it that April said? I couldn’t walk around pretending any of this made sense anymore. Perhaps nothing made sense anymore (the gaps are affecting everyone) and this was some kind of cultural illness they all shared. But just as Remy was getting his mind around the question, he felt a woman’s hand in his and he became aware of the pain behind his eyes; it roared and squealed into his head like a train pulling up to a platform, lights flashing, brakes screaming, and then it changed, became more specific, like someone nailing his left eye to his skull, hammer blows, cracks against a three-penny, and a pitched agony sought out the vacuum behind his eyes, wiping away the epiphany he was trying to have, just as Remy was putting words to it: What if I’m the only one aware of this? A lonely, chilling thought, and he wasn’t sorry to see it slipping away, too – leaving only a momentary impression, like a print in sand, before it blew away. He squeezed the hand.

“Hurts,” he rasped. He saw the usual streaks against the black, squirreling away when he tried to focus on them, but only half as many now, and only on the right side; the left was nothing but this sucking agony, a string of razor wire run through his left eye and into his brain, being tugged from the outside so that it strained everything on the way through. He tried to open his good eye but it was bandaged shut along with the bad one. He was grateful for the remaining flashers and floaters on the right side, so that there was at least something to see.

“I’ll get you something for the pain,” the voice whispered.

“Thank you,” Remy said. He reached up and touched the heavy bandages over his eyes. The tape covered most of his forehead and cheeks.

“And I’ll tell the surgeon you’re awake. He wants to talk to you.”

“What day is this?”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“Oh.” Then he heard her footsteps on the hard floor and Remy wished he’d asked a different question, a question about April. Wednesday meant nothing to him. For a few minutes there was only the pain and then more footsteps and the smell of briny cologne.

“How are you today, Mr. Remy?” The doctor mispronounced it, with a long E, but Remy didn’t correct him. “I’m Dr. Destouches. Orb cutter.” The cologne doctor’s voice was smooth and cool, like a disc jockey on a Sunday night jazz radio show.

“It really hurts,” Remy said.

“I should hope so. That’s the only way I know I’ve done my job.” The doctor adopted the voice of a lecturing professor. “Post-surgical eye trauma presents a truly unique sort of pain, Mr. Remy. It’s not localized, like a broken leg or a burn on your arm. You can’t touch it; it’s a generalized pain – but it’s not an ache. It is, at the same time, both sharp and diffuse.”

Remy just wished the man would stop talking about his pain.

“The body views eye surgery as such a severe violation,” Dr. Destouches continued, “a unique shock on every level. The eye is not designed to be cut into, like the skin; the central nervous system doesn’t know what to make of it when someone goes poking around on the top floors.”

“What was the surgery for?” Remy asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

The doctor laughed. “Well, since I see your signature right here on the release, I’m assuming that’s the anesthesia speaking and that we didn’t randomly crack open your head and try reattaching your retina without your permission.”

“No,” Remy said. “I’m having trouble keeping track of things. Everything skips.”

“That’s the anesthesia,” the doctor said. “You’ll start to get your bearings back in the next few hours.”

“No,” Remy said again. “It’s been that way for a long time. There are these gaps.”

“Yes, it can seem like that,” the doctor said, “but don’t worry. Once the anesthesia wears off, and the pain medication kicks in, you’ll be clear as a bell.” He shuffled pages again. “As for the surgery, I’m sorry to report that we were unable to reattach the retina. It was too far gone. So the vision in that eye… is severely compromised, Mr. Remy. After we take off the bandages you may still see some blurry images, especially on the edges, but in essence that eye is… gone. Black. Kaput.” He trailed off, but gave Remy little time before speaking again.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen eyes like yours. It’s like reading a textbook. The degeneration and detachment, the thinness of the retinas: remarkable. I’ve never seen such thin, tattered tissue on a human being that wasn’t a cadaver. It’s like mobile home curtains in there, Mr. Remy. It’s like the sheets in an old whorehouse. It’s like-”

“Okay,” Remy said.

“Is there a history of eye disease in your family?”

“I don’t think so,” Remy said.

“Because you have the eyes of a man in his nineties,” said Dr. Destouches. “And I have to ask – did you fly here?”

“Am I still in San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“Then I flew here.”

“And did your ophthalmologist in New York approve that?”

“No. In fact, I think he told me not to fly.”

“Well, so much for your malpractice suit.” Remy could hear papers being shuffled again. “The good news, such as it is, is that you can still see out of your right eye – for the time being. You have a lot of debris in your field of vision… flashers, floaters, that kind of thing.”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you’re one of those people who looks for silver linings in mushroom clouds, we did manage to cut those in half.” The doctor laughed at his own joke and cleared his throat. “But please, do yourself a favor and take a train or a bus back to New York. Your eyes are as fragile as origami, Mr. Remy. As fragile as a fat girl’s confidence on prom night. As fragile as-”

“I got it,” Remy said. The word fragile made Remy think of April; he wondered if she was waiting to see him.

“The change in pressure from flying would be very bad for you,” Dr. Destouches continued. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Remy said, chasing the flecks around his good eye.

“I’m going to put that right here. No flying.” Remy could hear the doctor scratching on a pad. “And a word of advice: You might want to cut back on the liquor. At least while you’re on medication. You had a blood alcohol level of.039. That’s four times the legal limit, Mr. Remy. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No drinking and no flying-”

THE PLANE shuddered and jerked with the rattle of molded and fitted plastic and the grind of jet engines, strained against the ground’s pull, and when it felt as if it were on the verge of shaking loose its aluminum shell, finally broke with the ground and became still. They were in the air. Remy opened his eyes, but only the right one opened, the left still trapped beneath the gauze. He had a small airplane whiskey bottle in his hand. He looked over to the seat on his left, hoping to see April, but it was Markham, chewing a pencil, his face screwed up over a mostly open crossword puzzle. Markham leaned in. “Okay. Six letters. Rift. Last letter m. Third letter might be an h.”

Remy closed his eye and leaned back. He opened his mouth to say schism but what came out was-

“THE CELL,” the agent Dave said slowly, lingering on each word, “from what we have been able to gather over the last few months, is constructed thusly.”

Remy looked around the simple conference room. He and Markham sat behind an oval table in swivel chairs. Dave, the tall, thin agent with the braces, stood in the glow of a big computer screen mounted on the wall in front of them. On the screen were the words CELL 93 and a chart connecting six silhouetted heads in a small pyramid. Beneath each silhouette was a number: one, two, and three on the bottom row of the pyramid, four and five in the middle, and six at the top. One of the silhouettes, number five, had a red line through it; another, number two, had a question mark over it.

“Thusly?” Markham said to Remy, under his breath.

Dave spun to face them. “What’s wrong with thusly?”

“Nothing. It’s just… nothing.”

Dave faced the wall, and then turned back to Markham again. “Look. You are guests in this operation. The agency does not typically cooperate like this. I’m out on a limb here. So I would appreciate some support. And professionalism.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Markham said. “My bad.”

“Ninety-three is a classic, small, leaderless cell, sui generis,” Dave continued, shooting a quick, defensive glance at Markham before going on. “Each of its members is connected to one or two other members, but no one member is aware of more than two others, so that if one person goes down, two or three can escape and the cell can theoretically regrow – like a snake losing a tail. This is why it’s important for us to get to as many members as possible.”

“Why’s it called Ninety-three?” Markham asked.

“We’re not sure. Maybe the group formed in 1993, although most of the relationships date from much earlier. Another theory, from our analysts, was that the name refers to the ninety-nine names for Allah, and that by subtracting the six members you get ninety-three. Of course, we are also monitoring FM radio stations with that frequency, listening to call letters, dedications, play lists, that sort of thing.” Dave pressed his thumb to the clicker. “Now let’s take a look at the cell members.”

Onto the screen came a black-and-white surveillance photo of a thin Arab man in shiny sweats, talking on a cell phone outside an apartment building. The man’s jaw stuck out in a severe underbite, making it seem as if he were working to keep his teeth from jutting out. “Subject Number One: Kamal al-Hassan, Saudi-born and educated, passionate and intelligent, speaks perfect English… Japanese sports car buff. May have become disillusioned with America as a twelve-year-old after his Taif team was eliminated in the first round of the Little League World Series.”

Markham didn’t look up from his notes. “Position?”

“Second base,” Dave said. “All glove, no bat. Decent range but had an arm that would embarrass a six-year-old girl. As an adult, he moved to Syria and worked as an agent, raising money for jihadist sports clubs under the umbrella of refugee services.” Dave clicked his thumb again and the next slide appeared, another photo of Kamal, this time in a business suit, stepping out of a limousine. “We have reason to believe he has recently made his way into the country, possibly through Canada.”

A photo came up showing a familiar-looking young Arab man in a business suit. Dave said, “Subject Number Two – Kamal’s brother Assan, lives in Miami-”

Remy gasped, but no one seemed to notice. It was the man they’d tortured on the ship outside Miami. Remy looked up at Markham, who shot a quick glance at Remy, scribbled something in a notebook on his lap, and then turned his eyes back to the screen.

“At least Assan lived in Miami,” Dave said. “Honestly, we don’t know where he is now. He’s been missing for months. We had believed he was opposed to his brother’s growing radicalism, but he may have gone underground in preparation for something.”

“You said you were going to let him go,” Remy hissed to Markham, who simply stared straight ahead.

“The next member,” Dave said, and Bishir’s picture appeared on the wall, “as… you well know, is the agency’s CI, Tarzan – Bishir. We’ve designated him Subject Number Three, even though obviously he’s providing us with intelligence. Of course, his cooperation gives us a huge advantage over our enemy – the bureau.” He glanced quickly at Markham and Remy. “I don’t mean to brag, but we believe this to be the deepest actual penetration of a terror cell by any U.S. agency.”

Markham gave a polite golf clap.

Dave clicked his thumb again and it took Remy a moment to recognize the next face. “We’ve identified Number Four as the weakest member of the group, Bishir’s brother-in-law-” It was Mahoud, the restaurant owner.

“Oh, come on,” Remy said, incredulous. “He’s not-”

But Markham reached over, grabbed his arm, and shook his head slightly.

“Mahoud Tasneem is a Pakistani restaurant owner here in the city,” Dave said. “We’re not entirely sure of his involvement or his motivation… all we know is that he recently contacted Bishir and volunteered to be involved, possibly in a support role, providing transportation, or a safe house.”

Dave hit the button again and on the wall was an image that Remy recognized: a man lying in a smear of blood on the sidewalk. It was the photo Buff had shown him in the gypsy cab.

“As you know, Subject Number Five, Bobby al-Zamil, is dead.” Dave cleared his throat. “Al-Zamil was a former associate of Bishir’s. The reason we initially approached you about March Selios was that Bishir brought her up under interrogation. He said he’d met her through al-Zamil, who had business dealings with her. We’re not sure why al-Zamil was eliminated; perhaps the group wanted him out of the way because he was under surveillance, or it could be that he was having second thoughts, or maybe it’s a kind of reality show thing and they just voted off a member. Whatever, it seems clear they killed him to avoid endangering the operation.”

Markham nodded earnestly.

“But rather than dissuade the group, al-Zamil’s death seems to have galvanized the others and, if anything, convinced them to step up the timetable. Which brings us to Subject Number Six,” Dave said, “the cell’s most mysterious member. Even Bishir isn’t sure of his real name. The others call him Ibn ’Arabi, which appears to be a reference to a pacifist Sufi teacher. We’ve given him the code name Jaguar.”

“Why not call him Iceman?” Markham offered.

“What?” Dave asked.

“Yeah,” Markham said. “You know… if it was me, I’d call him Iceman.”

Dave looked incredulous. “Iceman?”

“Yeah. Iceman.”

“You want us to call him Iceman? But his code name is Jaguar.”

“Isn’t that kind of… predictable?”

Dave put his hand across his chest, chagrined. “No, it’s not predictable… we chose Jaguar because of Tarzan. You know. It’s an animal.”

“Yeah. I guess. But isn’t it a bit melodramatic?”

Dave seemed stung by the criticism. “And Iceman isn’t?”

“It’s a literary reference. It’s more sophisticated.”

“Top Gun is a literary reference?”

“No… Iceman from the Eugene O’Neill play.”

Dave scrunched up his face. “It isn’t that play with the obnoxious kids trying to make a chorus line?”

“No, that’s A Chorus Line.”

“Because that was awful.”

“I’m not suggesting you name someone from A Chorus Line. I’m saying that you consider naming the cell leader Iceman.”

Dave shrugged. “Well, we can’t. It’s too late. And we already have an Iceman in Riyadh. It would be too confusing.”

“But Jaguar?”

“Yes,” Dave said. “Jaguar. Now, as I was saying, Bishir believes-”

“Jaguar?” Markham mumbled.

Dave cleared his throat. “Bishir believes the cell is being funded by… Jaguar. Unfortunately, we have no idea where Jaguar is getting his money. We’re following the usual charities, Swiss accounts, drug sales, energy markets, alt-country music royalties, et cetera… but so far we’ve come up blank. All we have is Bishir’s post office box. A week ago, a blank postcard arrived there – no prints – with a rendezvous point.”

The card appeared on the screen. It read WM PARK 0800. This time Remy wasn’t terribly surprised to recognize the handwriting as his own.

“At this meeting, we believe, targets will be assigned. Once this happens, we have two choices. We could take them down at the meeting, but we cannot move until we can account for all of the members, especially Jaguar. If we move… too quickly, we risk allowing some of them to escape. Move too slowly and-”

“It’s a race against time,” Markham said. Then he snorted into his hand like a high school kid trying to suppress a laugh in class.

“What?” asked Dave.

“Nothing,” Markham said, straightening up. But he closed his eyes and snorted again.

“What’s so funny?” Dave asked again.

Markham straightened his face. “Nothing. Just… nothing.”

Dave clicked his thumb and the next picture came up, Dave keeping his eyes on Markham disapprovingly. “This is the only photo we have of the man we believe to be Jaguar.” It was a grainy photo of two men leaning on the railing of a ferry. At first Remy tried to make out the man on the left, who may have been smoking a cigarette. “The man on the left is Assan,” Dave said, clicking the plunger again.

An enlargement of Jaguar appeared, even blurrier than the picture from which it was taken. His face was impossible to make out. But it was clear to Remy that the man was older, perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties, and that he was Middle Eastern, with short gray hair. And he was wearing a long, gray wool coat.

“Oh, no,” Remy muttered.

Dave ignored him. “This is Jaguar, the man they refer to as Ibn ’Arabi, an ironic reference to the teaching of Islam as a religion of love. We think Jaguar may have been a professor at one time, and may have taught one or more of the members. We think he may have become radicalized when he lost a family member, perhaps a son, during the first Gulf War, although we don’t know how, or to which side. We also believe he is Americanized, highly educated, with a knowledge of explosives-”

“No, I know that guy,” Remy said.

“Yeah.” Dave sighed and turned to face the fuzzy image of Jaguar. “That’s how I feel.” He walked to the wall and stared into the fuzzy image of the man in the wool coat. “When you finally see the enemy’s face, it’s like you’ve known him your whole life.”

“No-” Remy began.

“Oh, there is… one other consideration,” Dave said slowly, as if searching for the right words. “And it comes from the highest levels, and is not to be repeated outside this room.” He took a breath. “There is some… concern – as I said, at the highest levels – that the perception of danger has…”

“Waned?” Markham said.

“Yes. And we think it’s counterproductive for the public to view our enemies as a bunch of harmless nuts, lunatics with shoe bombs, ineffectual zealots. In other words, we can’t afford to capture a band of unarmed cabdrivers and motel operators.”

Markham looked over and raised his eyebrows, as if this were good news.

“We’re not looking for anything fancy,” Dave said. “It wouldn’t even have to be necessarily operational. But an enemy without weapons is a dog without teeth. So we are not to move until the enemy has an incendiary device.” Dave waited for this to sink in. “And then… we need to move fast.”

And just as Remy was about to stand up and say this was all crazy, Markham burst into nervous, staccato laughter. “It’s a spelling bee with death,” he said. “A hockey game against evil-”

APRIL ANSWERED the door of her apartment and stared coldly at him across the tightened chain. She was wearing jeans and an oxford shirt buttoned over a tank top. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her face seemed thinner. Pale.

Remy was pleasantly surprised to be there. “Hi,” he said.

She refused to meet his good eye. “What do you want, Brian?”

“What’s the matter?”

“What do you want?”

“What do I want? I… want to see you.”

“Why?”

“To talk.”

“About what?”

Remy was surprised by her iciness. “I miss you.”

“Tell me what you want, Brian.”

“Well…” He wasn’t sure where to start. “I seem to be involved in something and… I don’t know. I need to see you.”

Finally she looked up and seemed to notice the eye patch for the first time. But she didn’t say anything about it. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” he asked again. “Can’t I come in?” He looked past her, into her apartment. The living room was filled with cardboard boxes. Sweaters were stacked on the box closest to the door. “Are you going somewhere, April?”

“Yes,” she said. It felt to Remy that they were speaking too quietly and too quickly, like actors working over a familiar scene. “I’m moving.”

“What? Where?”

“I can’t do this now, Brian.”

“I can’t come in?”

“No,” she said. “You can’t come in.”

“Why?”

“I’m with someone.”

Remy looked past her. “I don’t see anyone.”

“You can’t see ghosts,” she said.

“Ghosts? What are you talking about, April?”

“Please don’t do this,” she said again, staring at the ground.

“Do what?”

“Act like you don’t remember.”

“I don’t remember. I never remember. There are these gaps.”

“Yes,” she said, easing the door shut. “So you’ve said-”

EDGAR LOOKED different – older, more self-assured – although it might have been his haircut. His mop of hair was much shorter, stubble on the sides and a small tuft in front; his old baggy clothes had been replaced by sweatpants and a rain jacket. And physically, he was definitely thicker, as Remy had noticed before, like he’d been lifting weights, his bony neck replaced by a kind of pedestal. Remy was parked along the street again, at dusk, at the top of the hill across from the same mall parking lot. He watched through one lens of the binoculars, traffic cresting the hill, and between the cars he caught glimpses of Edgar walking along the sidewalk. He stopped in the same place as before, hopped over the retaining wall, and dropped again down into the lot. Determined not to lose Edgar this time, Remy took off the binoculars, dropped them on the bench seat, jumped out of the car, and made his way across traffic. He ran down the sidewalk and climbed over the same retaining wall, his patched eye aching as he ran. It was drizzling as Remy dropped over the wall and into the parking lot, twisting his ankle on the five-foot fall. By the time he got back up, he’d lost the boy again.

“Edgar!” The parking lot was landscaped with little tree boxes at the end of every row, and Remy limped his way around cars and sickly trees, rising up on his tiptoes every few minutes to scan the mall for him. “Edgar!”

Groups of people moved along the sidewalks and into the courtyard at the center of the mall. A car honked and Remy got out of its way. He stepped up onto the sidewalk. “Edgar!”

He walked gingerly down the business storefronts, peering in each one: A futon store. A tax preparation business. Maternity clothes. Party supplies. A chiropractor. Rattan imports, golf supplies, tanning beds. He didn’t see his son anywhere, and honestly couldn’t imagine him in any of the stores. “Edgar! Where are you?” Stone ice cream and bagels, Army recruiting and guitar sales and cell phones and…

Remy stopped and stared at the stores he’d passed. He thought about Edgar’s haircut. He walked carefully toward the narrow Army recruiting office. It was a shallow storefront, and it looked as if most of the space was behind a single door. A sergeant with disquieting blue eyes, a thin mustache, and a fading chin was sitting at a desk, talking on the phone. Remy went inside. The sergeant looked up and ended the call.

“Good day, sir,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

Remy looked around. This part of the office was like a false front, a small space with a door leading deeper inside, or maybe to a back exit. “Did my kid come in here?”

“I’m sorry…?” the sergeant said.

“Edgar Remy.” Remy pointed to the door leading to the back of the office. A poster on the door showed the face of a rugged young man wearing fatigues, with smears of black eye paint as if he were simply going to play football. The poster read, ARE YOU READY? “Is Edgar back there?”

The man spoke calmly, reassuringly. “Sir, I’m not at liberty to say who is or isn’t here, except to immediate family.”

“I am immediate family,” Remy said. He moved for the door, but the soldier moved quickly in front of him. They were a few feet apart. “Look, you don’t want him,” Remy said. “He’s just a kid.”

The soldier smiled warmly. “That’s a common reaction when a young man volunteers. It’s hard to acknowledge when a child becomes a man.”

“He’s only sixteen,” Remy said.

The sergeant seemed genuinely amused. “You can rest assured, sir, we’re not going to let a sixteen-year-old enlist.”

This didn’t make Remy feel better. Could Edgar be eighteen? He knew that time had passed, but Edgar wasn’t old enough to join the Army. Was he? “This is a mistake. He’s not supposed to be here. He hasn’t signed anything, has he?”

The soldier took Remy’s arm. “Listen. As I said, I can’t say who’s here and who isn’t. But when a young man makes a decision like this, there is no turning back. And if that young man happens to be someone who lost his father, and wants to do something to avenge that good man, I find it hard to see how anyone who really cares for him could possibly call it a mistake.”

“I’m his father,” Remy said weakly.

“His stepfather?” the sergeant said.

“No. His father.”

The sergeant smiled patiently. “Look, call yourself whatever you want. I’m sure it’s not easy to raise another man’s child. A selfless job. I can see that-”

“Listen to me-”

“No.” He spoke so quietly that Remy had to lean in to hear him. “You listen. I’ve kept my patience, sir. But I’m not going to sit here while you dishonor the young men and women who put on this uniform.” The man tilted his earnest head and implored Remy with those electric blue eyes. “If you’re not going to respect and support this young soldier’s decision, I’m going to have to ask you to leave… before you disgrace the cherished memory of his father.”

Remy laughed; the noise struck him as slightly psychotic. He wondered – If I ran, could I make it past the soldier to the door? – but the recruiter seemed to anticipate this and slid over a step. After a moment, Remy backed out of the office. Through the closed glass door, the recruiting officer stood with his arms crossed.

Remy turned onto the sidewalk, staring first in one direction, then the other. There was something about being presented with choices that he didn’t entirely trust, so he hesitated, then began to walk away.

“Hey.”

Remy turned. Edgar was standing in the doorway of the recruiting office, staring at his shoes as the recruiter watched nervously through the window, waiting to pounce if Remy did anything suspicious. Edgar stepped outside, the glass door swinging closed behind him. His black hair, which he’d always worn moppy, was too short to part now, just a thin buzz that wasn’t enough to cover the pink of his scalp. “I just want you to know,” Edgar began, “that I understand how you feel.” He continued to stare at the ground. “I do. It’s just…” He stared off to his left, a pose so familiar that Remy ached to see his boy again, wondered what this buzz-headed young man had done with him.

“It’s just what?” Remy asked.

“Well,” Edgar shrugged. “I’ve made so much progress.”

“Progress,” Remy repeated.

“It’s not just me. Mom thinks so, too. And my therapist.” He leaned in. “I’ve been through all the stages of grief. You can’t want me to go back. What, to denial? Or… or anger?” He shook his head. “Anyway, I don’t think I can go back. Not now. Not after I’ve finally accepted your death.” Edgar looked up. He was as tall as his father now. But so different. “And really… someday, you are going to die. Right?”

Yes, Remy thought. Someday.

They stood on the mini-mall sidewalk, staring at the ground in front of each other. Edgar opened his mouth to say something else, but he shrugged instead. Then he pushed on the glass door of the recruiting office. And before Remy could say anything, or think of anything to say, the boy disappeared again behind-

THE DOOR was open a crack, and April leaned against it, her eyes red. “Please, Brian. You’re torturing me every time you do this.”

He was outside her apartment again, pleading through the tight chain. He closed his eyes, trying to shake the feeling that he’d already lived this moment. “April. I don’t know what I did wrong. You have to believe me. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember.”

“No.”

“You don’t remember leaving me in a hotel room in San Francisco?”

“Did I do that?” He winced. “I’m sorry, April. See, my retina detached.” He touched the patch. “My eye is-”

But she wouldn’t look up. “And you don’t remember leaving a note that said you couldn’t be with someone who was in love with a ghost?”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Remy closed his good eye. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please.” He looked again at the moving boxes, which were stacked by the door. “At least tell me where you’re moving?”

She stared past him. “I gave the money away.”

“What are you talking about? What money?”

“The settlement. The money you convinced me to get. I gave it all away. The lawyer got some. I gave some to Derek’s parents. And I donated the rest. In case that’s what you’re here for.”

“What?” Remy leaned against the door frame. “No, April. I don’t care about the money. I never cared about the money. Look, I don’t know what I did… but I’m sorry. I know I’ve been acting crazy, but I need you.”

“You need me.”

Remy was stunned by the flatness of her voice. He’d never seen this side of her. “Let’s forget this craziness and just… go somewhere. We’ll live in a hotel and… buy new clothes every day. Change our names-”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“Please. I’ll do anything to get you back.” He took her hand. “Isn’t there something I can do?”

“Well.” April pulled her hand away from his. Her eyes remained half-lidded, as if she were about to fall asleep. With those deep-set eyes, the effect was cool, intentional. “I suppose,” April said, “you could stop fucking my boss.” And then she gently closed the door in his face.

Remy stood there for a moment and then his head fell forward against-

THE DOOR of another apartment. He could hear laughter behind it. Remy lifted his head. He didn’t know whose door it was. He felt dizzy, like someone bobbing on the ocean, looking around for anything to cling to. He could hear footsteps approaching, and although he didn’t remember knocking, the door swung open, and there was Guterak, his hair neatly trimmed, a bottle of imported beer in his hand. “Hey, I knew you’d make it!” He turned and announced to McIntyre and Carey – “What’d I say? Didn’t I just say this fugger would never miss my premiere. Now this is a friend. Pay attention, you ungrateful freeloaders. Hey. Come in, man.”

Guterak looked thinner, mostly in the shoulders and chest, like he’d lost weight in all the wrong places, like a smaller version of the same bowling pin. His hair was different, too, styled and gelled into one of those intentional messes. A reed-thin woman with short black hair, also casually mussed, was setting up trays of food – seven-layer nachos and bread with spinach dip – on Guterak’s coffee table, in front of Carey and McIntyre, who sat next to each other on the couch, working their own beer bottles. They looked over their shoulders and nodded at Remy.

“Tara,” Guterak said. “You gotta come over and meet this guy. This is Brian Remy I was telling you about. We used to be in a car, me and him. Worked The Boss’s detail together before this fugger went and got a desk job, and then went and got himself a sweet disability. We went through some harrowing shit together that day.”

“Yes, you’ve told me,” she said, and Remy thought he caught just a trace of irritation in her voice. She came over, younger than Guterak by at least fifteen years, a girl on the border between cute and hard: laser green eyes and a stud in her right nostril.

“Remy,” Guterak said, with as much formality as he could muster, “this is Tara. She works for the production company I signed with, and apparently she has an unhealthy attraction to old cops.”

They shook hands.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.

When she let go of his hand, Remy self-consciously touched his eye patch. He wondered why no one mentioned his eye.

“So how’s early retirement, you lazy mutt?” asked McIntyre. He sat with a beer on Guterak’s futon.

“Your back can’t be too bad,” Carey said, as a pile of dip fell from a tortilla chip into his thick hand. “You’re still walking upright.”

“My back’s fine,” Remy said quietly.

“Come on. I’ll get you a beer.” Guterak led Remy into the kitchen.

Remy looked around the kitchen of Guterak’s apartment, and at the pictures of his kids on the small refrigerator. He took the beer and managed a long swallow. He leaned against the kitchen table. “Listen, Paul… I need your help. I’m wrapped up in something here… I don’t know… there’s some crazy stuff happening and… I might be on the wrong side of it.”

“Yeah, you really fugged up, man. I talked to April. She told me you slept with her boss. What were you thinking?”

“You talked to April?”

Guterak leaned in close. “Who’d have thought we’d get these young women, huh? Like we got a fuggin’ sex mulligan, ain’t it? Tradin’ our old broads for these babes. No, you should definitely go back. On your hands and fuggin’ knees, man.”

“No, it’s more than just April,” Remy said. “I’m losing track of everything, Paul… I do things I don’t remember. It’s almost like there are two of me.” He leaned in closer. “There was this thing in Miami, and then I went to San Francisco… there’s this pecan dish and this duck, and this old Arab guy in a wool coat… and Jesus, I’m starting to think” – as the words formed in his throat, Remy knew the truth of this particular thought – “I’m starting to think that… this bad thing is going to happen no matter what I do.”

“I’ll call April tomorrow. I’ll talk to her.”

“This is not about April!”

“Paul!” Tara called from the other room. “It’s on.”

“Come on, man. You’re gonna want to see this.” Guterak walked into the living room and after a minute alone in the kitchen, Remy followed. He stood in the back of the room.

On TV was the cop show that was always shouting about being ripped from the headlines. The music played – duh-Duh – and then the first scene: A deliveryman was pushing a handcart with a big-screen television on it, when he came across a dead body. In the next scene, the two regular detectives were crouched over the body. Remy knew the ritual: the body always came first, and then the detectives’ job was to go to locations around the city and interview people quickly, asking one or two questions before moving on to the next interview, to make sure they caught the killer before the trial began in the second half of the show. The camera panned down to show the victim: a young Arab man splayed out on a sidewalk. The camera looked up to the window from which he’d tumbled, accidentally or, no doubt, otherwise.

Remy looked at Guterak, but he showed no reaction.

The show tramped along. The cops interviewed their witnesses; one, a social worker who lived in the building, told the detectives that she recognized someone on the sidewalk right after the man fell out of the window – a retired cop named Bruce Denny, who’d recently left the force because of back problems. The lab also had a footprint from a shoe at the scene and they wanted to compare the print to Bruce Denny’s shoe.

Remy covered his mouth. He looked around, but no one else seemed to see anything strange in what they were watching.

Duh-Duh. One of the detectives picked Bruce Denny up at the airport to question him. On the show, Bruce Denny wore an eye patch. Remy touched his eye patch again.

“Jesus, Paul,” Remy began.

“Shhh,” said Tara.

The detective asked Denny his shoe size. It was twelve – the same size as the footprint at the murder scene, the same size Remy wore. Then Bruce Denny asked if he could confide in the detective. He may have been at the scene, Denny confided, but he couldn’t remember. He said he was having some kind of problem with his memory, that he was having “gaps.” And he asked the detective to follow him.

“Follow you?” the detective asked.

“Yeah. Follow me.”

“Like… keep track of what you’re saying?”

“No. Tail me. I think I’m involved in something and I want to find out what it is.”

That’s when the first commercial break came.

Remy looked down at Guterak in disbelief. “Jesus, Paul, did you…”

“Shhh-” Guterak raised a hand and pointed at the TV. “Here it comes.”

The TV cut to commercial and Remy saw how seamlessly this happened, one world to another and the detectives were gone and two kids were standing in a clean suburban living room – just like Carla and Steve’s house, Remy thought – staring out a window as emergency lights rolled across their faces. “Cool!” one of them said. As the rousing music swelled behind them, the camera moved outside to settle on a firefighter and a cop standing in the street, talking and gesturing toward some unseen emergency, a blur of police tape and swirling lights. The cop was Guterak. He and the firefighter turned to the camera, shot and lit from below, like superheroes.

“When trouble comes-” said the firefighter.

“And it will-” said Guterak.

And then they both pointed to the camera and said in unison: “You need to have a hearty breakfast! The breakfast of heroes.”

And cut to a sunny breakfast table. On the table were two boxes of cereal, at perfect angles; behind them were the kids in soft focus, devouring their cereal as if they hadn’t eaten in months. Each box looked like an American flag; the firefighter was on one, Guterak on the other, looking serious, staring off into space. Through the magic of television, both men winked from their boxes of cereal.

The camera returned to the photogenic kids, their spoons overflowing with hearty oat goodness.

“I got the flakes!” said one, and Remy thought he sensed just the slightest disappointment in this boy, who also had slices of bananas in his cereal.

“I got marshmallows!” said the other kid, with no reservations.

And then the deep-voiced narrator said: “First Responder. The cereal of heroes.”

When it was over, McIntyre, Carey, and Tara applauded. Remy didn’t know what to do.

“Baby,” said Tara, “you’re a star.”

“So what do you think, Brian?” Guterak asked nervously.

But before Remy could answer, he felt the moment slipping and-

AT DAWN, joggers circled the kidney-shaped lawn. Their footfalls echoed softly against the retaining walls surrounding the edge of the park. Remy sat on the steps leading to the park, above the dewy grass. He had an open book in his hands, but he was staring past it toward the damp field. He was getting used to seeing out of one eye, to seeing around corners. In some ways, he wondered if this wasn’t a more accurate view of the world, without the gap between his eyes, that little bit of distance that the brain corrected and covered. And he wondered about blind spots, if there weren’t things that only he could see now, things the binocular missed.

In the park, a woman walking a little dog looked both ways before allowing the animal to shit in the bark surrounding the red jungle gym. Closer, a homeless man slept at the edge of the grass, parting the flow of runners as smoothly as a rock in a river. Remy counted six joggers in a lap, five men and a woman, and in the next lap it was seven, and then nine, and twelve, as if he were seeing in crackled time-lapse. Sunlight began to wash over the park. Nearly all the joggers wore tiny headphones, listening to music only they could hear, as alone in the world at that moment as it was possible to be. Soon the first commuters joined the joggers, slowly making their way across the park toward the financial district, like blood cells to a wound.

Women in dark pantyhose and tennis shoes carried huge bags; men in suits strode purposefully, barking into cell phones. Remy thought of that other morning, distant, urgent, end of summer, a glimpse of cool fall, primary day, people stopping to vote, dropping kids at schools and daycares, just getting to their offices, sitting at desks, arranging photos, looking through call sheets, and he imagined April, her recently returned husband gone to work, humming around the house, thinking that her life was back to some semblance of normal, then finding his cell phone, listening to the message and calling her sister at work, and March, crying at her desk – both of them believing that morning was the worst of their lives, no idea, until a low roar cleaved the morning air-

The homeless man rose in the park. He was a chunk of a black man in grease-stained jeans and a parka. He stretched and immediately went to work – even the homeless have to be ambitious down here, Remy thought, Type A panhandlers – and his outstretched hand only drove the flow of passersby further afield. Most held a single hand up to stop him from asking, though a few shook their heads and eventually one man was distracted into kindness, digging in his pocket absentmindedly as he talked on his cell, as if the beggar were a tollbooth.

Two more rejections, and then the homeless man hooked another one, a young Middle Eastern man. Remy raised his head. The man… was Kamal, Assan’s brother, Subject Number One. He was sure of it. Wearing a blue blazer and tan slacks, Kamal seemed like a thinner version of Assan… like a higher branch of the same tree. He was carrying a brown package, wrapped like a sandwich. He glanced nervously around the park. Kamal tried to shake off the homeless man, who grabbed his arm and seemed intent on telling Kamal something. Finally Kamal nodded and continued walking, until he reached a park bench, where he sat stiffly, as if waiting for someone. He set the sandwich on the bench next to himself. Remy checked his watch. It was three minutes to eight.

At eight sharp, a second figure approached the bench where Kamal was sitting. It was Bishir, the agency’s man inside the cell. He was wearing a windbreaker. He sat down and pretended not to speak to Kamal. After a moment, Subjects Number One and Two stood up, moments apart, and began walking toward the street. This time, Bishir was carrying the sandwich. They walked next to one another, but moved stiffly, trying so hard not to draw attention that they looked ridiculous.

Remy scrambled down the steps and fell in behind the men. They walked slowly across the street and paused at a grade school, arguing about something in front of its fanciful brick and iron fence. Kamal gestured at the section of fence that looked like a ship on gently rolling seas, and Remy touched his pirate’s eye patch and felt himself go cold. Not a school. They wouldn’t try a school…

They began walking and Remy moved behind them again. As they turned a corner, he saw the agent Dave sitting in a parked car with another man he didn’t recognize. Was the agency in control of all this? Did Remy need to follow Kamal anymore? A moment later, Kamal and Bishir disappeared down the stairs of a subway station. Dave and the other agent hurried behind them.

Was that it? Had Remy done his part? Perhaps it was possible after all – that if he just went with events as they presented themselves, things would work out. Traffic was beginning to pick up. Maybe he could even get some breakfast-

Then Kamal came out of the subway entrance across the street. Alone. He walked quickly down the sidewalk, breaking into a kind of skip-run. Remy looked around in vain for Dave, and now Kamal was rushing down the block. Remy ran across the street, trying to look like someone late for a bus, and stayed half a block from Kamal, whose head swung regularly as he moved, like a lizard. Remy felt frantic with confused adrenaline. Was he supposed to stop Kamal? Was something happening? Would he recognize it if it did?

He stayed behind Kamal, keeping an eye out for Dave, but the agent was nowhere to be found. Had Kamal lost him? Subject Two turned north, then west, south, and finally east again – a completed circle around the block. Remy stayed back at least a half block, trying to look nonchalant, which was difficult at the pace Kamal was setting for him. He paused here and there, ostensibly to check his watch, and kept moving down the block.

Kamal hurried toward a cluster of public buildings. Remy felt a surge of angry hopelessness. Everything here was a potential target. Cupolas and arches and pillars, the breathless neoclassical mass at the end of the block: Any of them would work, Remy thought, all of them packed with people and symbolic weight. He thought of a map of downtown tourist attractions he’d seen once, and he thought: The whole city is a target. Ahead of him, Kamal stopped suddenly, looked back over his shoulder, and took a sharp left, disappearing into an ornate building Remy had never really noticed before, wedged between all of these larger structures.

Remy hurried to catch up, but he didn’t know if he should go inside, and he didn’t want to lose Kamal, who might come right back out. Instead, Remy drifted into a small park across the street, where he could see the whole building. He stood behind a tree and took in the face of the grand building, which he noticed now was like a kind of coded map. Three arches on the first floor gave way to a row of three-story columns and then a wedding-cake topper lined with statues of men – famous men Remy didn’t recognize, men looking down on him in judgment, men waiting for history to occur. Even towering over the street, the men seemed real, down to the wrinkles in the sculpted folds of their coats. Above the statues, gaudy dormers poked from the roof, home to cherubs and eagles and shields, a symbolic, indecipherable alphabet that sparked in Remy an old wish for more education, enough to illuminate the significance of the ship’s prow, or the soldier and maiden on one side and the Indian and Pilgrim on the other, staring down at him with a sepulchral patience that was as terrifying as anything he’d ever felt.

Something buzzed at Remy’s waist. He patted himself down and found a cell phone on his belt. He opened it and put it to his ear.

“There’s a game show I’d like to pitch,” said a familiar voice on the other end of the phone. It was the old Middle Eastern man in the wool coat. Jaguar. “Name That Sacred Text: Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out… Idolatry is worse than carnage.”

“Where are you?” Remy asked. He looked around the park and his eyes went back to the statues on the building before him.

“Here’s another one,” Jaguar said. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath. Okay, so which is which?” He made a buzzing noise. “No, I’m sorry. The correct answer is that there is no difference, except maybe over whether we were created from dirt or from a blood clot.”

“Where are you?” Remy asked again.

“And speaking of graven images, here’s something I don’t understand,” Jaguar said over the phone. “All those people who genuinely believe they saw Satan in the smoke that day. Don’t you find it just a little bit demoralizing, to be fighting ignorant, dark-ages zealotry when half of the people you’re fighting for believe the devil lives in a cloud of smoke and ash?”

Remy put his hand on his gun again and edged around the park, looking behind trees. “Where are you?” Remy asked between gritted teeth.

“I’m right where you told me to be.”

“Where?”

“Right here.”

Remy spun around. “Who are you?”

“Please,” he said over the phone. “This isn’t the best time-”

“They said you’re organizing and funding a cell here. That you are buying explosives.”

“Ri-i-ight,” the man said, as if this were obvious. “With the money you gave me. I’m sorry. Did you need a receipt?”

“The money I gave you?” Remy began to feel off-balance again. He recalled the envelope of cash. “But… they said you were…”

“That I was what?” he asked.

“…Jaguar,” Remy said quietly.

“Jaguar? No. Really?” The man scoffed. “That’s awful. God, is the entire agency made up of morons? Look, I appreciate that you don’t want to endanger your work by telling those amateurs about me… But come on – Jaguar? How could you let them do that to me?”

Remy slumped against a tree.

“What about Iceman. Or something that reflects my education – Doc, for example? Tell them that I find Jaguar culturally and racially offensive. Tell them you’re worried that I’ll file a civil rights complaint. That ought to scare those officious assholes.”

“I don’t-” Remy touched his forehead, trying to put it together. “Are you saying that… you work for us?”

“Us?” He laughed. “I’m sorry, but your idea of us tends to be a little bit fluid, my friend. Either you’re with us or… what? You switch sides indiscriminately… arm your enemies and wonder why you get shot with your own guns. I’m sorry, but history doesn’t break into your little four-year election cycles. Are you with us?” The man laughed, winding down. “May as well ask if I am aligned with the wind.”

“Look. I just need to know-” Remy squeezed his good eye shut. “Are you…” He couldn’t find the words. “…trying to hurt people?”

“Which people?”

“Innocent people,” Remy gritted.

The man laughed. “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

“I’m going crazy,” Remy said.

“Yes… I used to think that,” said the man on the phone. “The sorrow would come over me. Like a fever. And I would scratch at my own face, tear at my skin until the pain and the rage felt like one thing… then, I used to wonder if I’d gone crazy. But other times-” There was a rustling, and then he said, “Okay. Your boy picked up the package. He’s on the move again. Your turn.”

Remy spun around the tree and saw Kamal leave the ornate building, this time with a larger package, in a shoulder athletic bag. Remy began following him again on foot, though he was unsure what to do. He still had the phone at his ear.

“Other times,” Jaguar said over the phone, “don’t you wonder if they’re all crazy? With their stone pilgrims, and their marble soldiers, with their virgins in paradise and their demons in smoke? Sometimes I think I’m the last sane person on Earth.”

And then-

REMY SPRINTED down an alley, around a pile of cardboard, a bicycle rack, and some plastic garbage cans. He came out on the narrow street, between the fire escapes of two old tenements with glossy new entryways. He stopped and looked around. Was this where he was running? Something, the activity, his racing heart, caused the flecks in his good eye to swarm like bees. His left eye – black as a painted window – throbbed behind the gauze. Remy stared around at the street in front of him, panting. He looked left. And then right.

And then Kamal burst around the corner to his left, looking over his shoulder as he sprinted down the sidewalk, carrying the athletic bag like a huge football. As Remy watched, the man darted between two parked cars and ran into the street. Remy stood tensed on the sidewalk, in the middle of the block, unsure what to do – until he saw Markham dart around the same corner, waving a gun and sprinting twenty paces behind Kamal, but losing ground on him. Remy stepped around a parked car. Kamal saw him and tried to veer, but Remy jumped, hit Kamal full with his shoulder, and knocked the smaller man to the street. The athletic bag skidded beneath a car. Kamal started to get up, but Remy was on him, pushing him facedown to the blacktop, a knee in Kamal’s back. Remy grabbed Kamal’s wrist, and he said calmly, “Give me your other arm.” Beads of sweat clung to his cheek. Kamal pulled his other arm out and Remy wrenched it behind the man’s back, causing him to groan.

“Nice work,” Markham said as he came up, panting. He pulled a plastic pair of zip-ties from his pocket and flipped them to Remy, who put them over Kamal’s wrists, pushed the ends through, and zipped them tight. Markham reached under the car and pulled out the athletic bag. “What do we have here? A little present for the great Satan?”

“You are making a mistake,” Kamal said, his face pressed against the street.

“The only mistake I made was not shooting you in the ass when you ran away from me,” Markham said. “And I heard you throw like a girl.”

“A mistake,” Kamal repeated, pushing his lips back over his jutting teeth.

And then Remy heard tires screaming and a car barreled around the corner and squealed to a halt in front of them, bucking like a horse before it finally stopped. It was a dented silver gypsy cab with brand new tires. Remy watched as two thick guys in sweatshirts and ball caps climbed out of the car, guns drawn, white wires dangling from their ears. One of the guys was the greasy homeless man from the park.

“Get the fuck off of him,” said the other man – the familiar agent with the crooked mustache and the BUFF ball cap.

Markham was still in the street, holding the athletic bag. “Who are you?” he asked.

Buff held up a small wallet for Markham to read. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing hassling our CI?” he said.

“What?” Markham looked dumbfounded. Remy almost felt bad for him. “He’s a bureau informant?”

“Goddamn it, Remy,” Buff said. “We’re this close to penetrating this group of lunatics and you come along and nearly fuck it all up.”

“You know this guy?” Markham asked Remy.

“So help me,” Buff said to Markham, “if you endanger our operation, you’ll be pissing through a tube the rest of your life. Do you understand me?”

Remy, for once, felt ahead of events. You can’t beat this thing, he thought. You can want to do the right thing; you can vow to pay attention, to focus, to connect the dots. But once you start down this path, it really doesn’t matter. Every path leads to the same place, events like water circling toward a drain. Without the slightest hesitation, Remy got off Kamal, cut the plastic handcuffs off his wrists, and helped him off the ground.

Kamal’s eyes were misty. “These animals killed my brother,” he muttered to Remy. “I wouldn’t help them, so they killed Assan. These are not Muslims. They are animals. I would do anything to stop them.”

And that’s when Markham finally caught up. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He threw his hands in the air and spun away, like a pitcher who has just walked the tying run. “Is there anyone in this cell who happens not to be a government informant?”

THE CUBICLES were empty, the lights off. Remy checked his watch. It was after ten – must be nighttime – and the filing room staff was apparently off duty. He stepped up onto a chair and saw that he was in the center of this vast room, with only the pillars every fifteen or twenty feet breaking up the maze of cubicles. At each corner of the room a doorway led out, and above each doorway was a billboard-size inspirational sign quoting The President.

Remy stepped off the chair and looked around. He was standing in a cubicle. There was a desk with a computer, two filing cabinets, and a wastepaper basket. A frame containing a studio picture of a young man in a flannel shirt with two children was magneted to the desk, next to a stack of paperwork.

Remy took a document from the stack. This particular piece of paper wasn’t scorched or wrinkled. Like the paper in the airplane hangar, it was more recent, a credit card statement for a woman in Sandpoint, Idaho. There was an entry outlined with a yellow highlighter – a donation to a charity called AfghanChildRelief. Remy thumbed through the other pages, most of them recent receipts.

Remy folded the credit card statement, put it in his pocket, and continued moving through the cubicles, each identical except for the photos on the desks. Eventually, he came to the end of this big filing room and found himself beneath one of the doorways. Overhead was a quote from The President, calling on his countrymen to “draw your strength from the collective courage and resilientness.” Remy pushed through the door and found himself in long corridor leading to his office. He walked down the quiet hallway, past each dark office. A faint light glowed at the far end of the corridor. He walked past his office and kept going, until he got to the last door in the hallway, the one marked SECURE. A light was on inside, coming from a back room.

Remy took a breath and opened the door.

The outer office was dark and empty. It was a reception area, ornate, with a couch and a round desk and walls papered with framed magazine covers, certificates, and photos. A door to the back office was open a crack. Remy moved through the reception area and pushed the door all the way open.

The Boss was sitting behind a desk as big as a queen-size bed, lecturing his young ghostwriter, who was nodding and taking notes as he droned about “the best examples being the military and organized crime…”

The Boss looked up. “Hello, Brian.”

“What are you doing here?” Remy asked.

The Boss consulted his watch. “What do you mean? I’m right on time. You’re the one who’s late. Which reminds me-” He pointed his finger at the ghostwriter. “The first rule of effective leadership is to manage your time better than your money. Anyone can make money. Only leaders can make time.” The ghost took it down.

“How’d you get in here?” Remy asked.

“How did I get in… where?” The Boss looked from the ghostwriter to Remy and back. “How did I get into my own company?”

Remy took a step back. He looked around the office. There was a treadmill and a couch, a television and a DVD player. The walls were covered with photographs of The Boss posing with world leaders and touring The Zero with celebrities. In one photo, the Queen was knighting him. Next to that picture was a photo of The President and The Boss shaking hands, above a framed certificate from the Office of Liberty and Recovery lauding Secure Inc., for its “invaluable assistance in the War on Evil.”

“What’s the matter?” The Boss stood. “Are you sick or something?”

“Something.” Remy fell into a chair. His mind scrambled back through his previous meetings with The Boss, trying to rewind fragments of dialogue, to find some hint of what he’d known.

The Boss waved at the ghostwriter, who pushed his glasses up on his nose, gathered his things, and left the room.

When they were alone, The Boss leaned over his desk toward Remy. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You’re not working too hard, I hope.”

“I work for you.”

The Boss just stared.

“I’m not… working for the government… on some secret case.”

“Are those agency bastards trying to steal you away from me? Or is it the Bureau?” he asked. “Look, Brian. I know you must be nervous because this job is ending, but this is not the end. After this, we’ll have plenty of other jobs. This is only going to create more opportunity. And I’m not going to forget your contributions, if that’s what you’re worried about. There is no shortage of opportunities for someone with your unique…” His pause seemed long, intentional. “Skill set.”

Remy pulled out the credit card statement he had taken from one of the cubicles. “We make money on this?”

The Boss sat up straight, stung. “You and I serve our country, Brian. We stepped in to do work that the government couldn’t.” The Boss tried another tack. “It’s just like we said in our proposal, Brian: in today’s world, there is no separation between civilian and soldier, between business and government. The private sector is the ultimate covert ops. We won’t win this war without using our greatest weapon – our free market economy. You said it yourself.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Remy offered weakly.

The Boss waved him off. “It doesn’t matter who said what. Things were said. I’m sure you said something.” He sighed. “Look, I know how you feel. I do. Your work is coming to an end. Everything has been set in motion, and when it plays out the credit will go to other people. We will fade into the background again. I understand how that feels. But you and I will know, Brian. You and I… we’ll always know what we did.” The Boss reached in his breast pocket, pulled out an envelope, and slid it across the desk at Remy. “Here you go. Last of the seed money.” The Boss stood and began pulling on his coat.

Remy opened the envelope, saw the bundles of hundred dollar bills. His mouth was dry. “What if I quit?” he asked.

The Boss had turned to take his briefcase from the desk. He smiled.

“What if I don’t do anything else?” He thought of April. “What if I just… leave.”

The Boss considered him for a long time. “What’s this about, Brian? Are you asking for a raise?”

“No, I’m not asking for money. I’m quitting.”

“You’re going to quit your own operation, just as it’s coming to fruition? I don’t believe that.” The Boss smirked. “You’re free to do that, of course. You’ve done your part. But ask yourself this, Brian: If someone gets hurt because you failed to see this through to the end… can you live with that?”

Remy felt sick. He thought about Jaguar, about Markham and Dave and Buff. He thought of Assan on the boat and the way Kamal blamed that on the terrorists, al-Zamil on the sidewalk and how Dave blamed that on the terrorists. His head fell into his hands.

The Boss was at his ear, speaking in an insistent whisper. “I know this has been hard, Brian. I know you’ve second-guessed yourself… but do you honestly believe for a second that either one of us would be involved in anything that wasn’t entirely necessary? I’ll ignore for a moment the implication that you don’t trust me… Surely you trust yourself.”

Remy didn’t say anything.

“Come on. What are you afraid of?”

“That I’m causing something bad to happen.”

The Boss laughed. “That you’re causing it? That’s a little grandiose, isn’t it? Look around you, Brian. We live in a divided world. You and I didn’t make that up. We didn’t make up the hole in the heart of this city, or the people who want to see our way of life destroyed. Whatever is happening now was going to happen whether we were involved or not. We’ve always known that another attack was inevitable.”

“But these guys all work for-”

“These guys… are our enemies. These guys have all engaged at one time in anti-American actions or thoughts or they wouldn’t be where they are,” The Boss said. “These guys hate our freedoms. You didn’t cause the seditious letters these men wrote or the conversations they had. We owe it to the people who died in this city to find animals like this, animals capable of this kind of barbarism, and stop them before they even think of it.” He seemed to be searching for a way to make Remy understand. “Look, a hunter can’t flush birds without sending a dog into the brush. My firm was hired to flush the birds. We provided a dog. A dog doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t worry about causes. He runs where he’s told. He barks. And then…” The Boss pulled on his coat. “He waits for ducks to start falling.”

The Boss shook his head as he buttoned his coat. “You want to know what caused this, Brian? All of this? I’ll tell you.” He looked around the ornate office, as if noticing it for the first time. “Ask yourself this: What causes hunger?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Hunger.”

THE GUINNESS fit perfectly in his right hand, the red shuffleboard stone in his left. Remy looked around. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” he said.

“Where you supposed to be?” asked an old man leaning against the shuffleboard table. Remy stared at him – it was Gerald Addich, the old man whose planner he’d found in the rubble. His head was dominated by those huge ears and by the spit of gray curly hair lapping his forehead. He spoke in grave, third-generation Irish, his head bowed slightly forward, as if the goddamn thing were too heavy to hold up.

“I don’t know,” Remy said. “But there’s something happening… and I should probably be…” Be what? Remy was stumped.

“Always something happening,” said the old man. “But if you don’t know where else to be… this place is as good as any. Your throw, Cap’m Hook.” The bar was small and crowded, and Remy was playing shuffleboard with this ancient little man, so pale he was nearly translucent in his vintage suit with a ruffled white handkerchief and gold-crested slippers. “Anyway, you can’t leave till I answer your question,” the old man said.

“Okay.” Remy slid the stone across the cornmealed boards.

“Hey, now, that’s got a chance,” said the old man as the disc spun and slid to the end of the boards, hung there for a moment, and finally fell. “On a planet with more gravity. Ah, you greedy old pirate,” said the old man. “You do realize that you don’t score any points if it flies off the end. I’ve explained that, right?”

Remy took a drink of his Guinness.

“Okay, then,” Addich said. “What did you ask? Oh, right. You wanted to know how a man knows if he’s done the right thing? Boy, that’s a doozy.” The old man stuck his bottom lip out and his chin slid away into his neck. “I’m going to venture that he doesn’t ever know.” The old man leaned forward. “But while he may never know if he did the right thing… I’ll tell you this: He generally knows when he’s doing the wrong thing. But that isn’t what you were really asking.”

“It’s not?” Remy asked.

“No. I think what you’re really asking, if I’m not mistaken, is about this city.”

“The city?”

“Not just the city,” said Addich. “This city. Listen: I know that arrogant shit bird you work for thinks he invented the place, but he didn’t. I worked for Lindsay when he was Boss and every goddamned day was a disaster would’ve broke that bully you worked for. Sixty-six in Browns and the east, Negroes fighting the PRs fighting the Guineas, it was a war in there. A goddamn war. This little three-year-old, little Russell Givens – you remember Russell Givens?”

Remy didn’t.

“How could anyone forget Russell Givens? See, that’s the problem: We got institutional memory like a whore on her fourth marriage. This poor Russell, he gets shot one day from a balcony. We send fifty cops in and it’s like a tickertape parade on these poor flats, ’cept with bricks and shoes and flaming beer bottles.”

The little old guy skidded a stone down the boards and it came to rest squarely in the threes. “Look at that! Two more thick ones here, Mona!” he yelled, waving his beer. “For me and my troubled young friend – what’s your name again?”

“Remy.”

“Freddie. You know what just struck me, Freddie? Russell Givens, he’d be, what, forty-something today?” The old guy shook his head. “’Bout your age. Course everyone stays at the age they die. Russell will always be three. And I’ll always be old.”

Addich stared off for just a second. “So, yeah… Sixty-six? Transit workers go on strike… you wanna see a city shut down, put the bus drivers and subway workers on strike. Garbage men two years later, mounds of trash all over the Lower East, rotting peels, smells like the whole place died – the teachers in O-Hill, every union in the city woke up the same day and said, ‘Let’s shut this son-of-a-bitch down.’ Rockaways, Bushwick, South J, Corona – everyplace bubbling and melting in the heat of summer and it seems like every block got poorer and more racist and more violent every day – city was burning up. And we had crazy Muslims then, too, the Five-Percenters killing Jews up the heights, till someone shot their boss.” He grabbed Remy’s arm. “City was a tinderbox. Your turn, kid.”

Remy slid a stone and again it rode the cornmeal to the end, hung on a little longer than the first throw, and then fell.

“Firemen had to carry sticks and guns to fires. People would set fires just to get a crack at beating a fire crew – used to steal their equipment, their pants, their trucks. We send in cops to protect the fire crews, and then we gotta send more cops to protect the cops we sent to protect the firemen we sent to put out the fire. We’re gettin’ three, four fires a day, and before too long the trucks just stop going to some neighborhoods… whole blocks burning down, and right in the middle of it, like some stupid weather girl telling you it’s hot in August, goddamn Kerner comes along to tell us the one thing we know: We got racist cops and crowded ghettos.”

The old man stepped forward and threw another stone, gliding it along the boards until it came to rest against his first throw. Just then a waitress arrived with two more beers. “Pay the girl, Bluebeard. And tip her like you had a chance with her.”

Remy handed the waitress a ten.

“And the hippies!” The old guy shook his head and looked up at Remy, his eyes like tiny polished stones. “Village looked like a goddamn circus. Radicals at Columbia running around yelling, ‘Against the wall, mothers – ’ protests every day, protesters protesting protests. And not like today, these ladies in jogging suits marching on their lunch hour. We had ex-cons with bricks. Honest-to-God agitators. Cops didn’t know whose heads to crack, so they just cracked ’ em all.” He shook his head. “Cracked every goddamn one. Your throw.”

Remy concentrated so that this stone wouldn’t go off the edge, and threw it about halfway, along the right rail. It drifted off the boards, hung a moment, and dropped.

“You have got to be the worst goddamn shuffleboard player I ever seen,” said the old man.

“Bottom line, I suppose it was garbage that killed Lindsay. And in the end it all turned to garbage. The whole city was garbage – schools bad, services bad, crime up, parks and subways a horror show, corrupt cops, and everything we did made it worse. Pay the sanitation workers more to get the garbage, and the teachers strike. Send cops to stop the protests and they beat the protesters, which causes more protests, so we gotta send more cops.”

He turned, grabbed Remy’s arm, and spoke in a low growl: “This city – is a big goddamn place, kid. A monster. You can’t imagine all the stuff that can go wrong here in a day. This was the city Lindsay ran, the city I had a part in running. For ten goddamn years this place was unlivable. It was a sinkhole. An ungoddamnlivable sinkhole. And then you know what happened? Do you?”

Remy waited. The old man got even closer, so near they could’ve kissed. “It got worssse,” he hissed. “Seventy-six… seven? Bottom rung of hell. Drugs. Gangs. Bankruptcy. I almost moved myself, four, five times.” Then the old man leaned back and thought a moment. “But then something happened. Something… unexpected. A miracle.”

“What?” Remy asked.

Addich took a long drink of beer. “I went… for a walk. One night I couldn’t sleep. I got up early, before dawn. Got dressed. And I went for a walk. It was spring. Air was fresh and clean. And it was amazing… the shopkeepers misting the flowers, kids delivering papers, and there was this couple standing on the stoop next to my building, holding hands, on this date that neither one of them wanted to see end. And it hit me. This is a hard place. God, it’s a hard place. But it wakes up every morning. No matter what you do to it the night before. It wakes up.”

The old man backed away. He stepped up to throw, but turned and considered Remy’s face. “When I saw those lunatics in the Middle East on TV… jumping up and down celebrating because some nut jobs had murdered three thousand people, you know what I thought?”

Remy shook his head.

“I thought, Fuck you. We used to kill that many ourselves in a good year. This city, it doesn’t care about you. Or me. Or them. Or Russell Givens. This city cares about garbage pickup. And trains. That’s the secret… what the crazy assholes will never get. You can’t tear this place apart. Not this city. We’ve been doing it ourselves for three hundred years. The goddamn thing always grows back.”

THE MOON was just a shaving, a bright sliver of lemon peel hung between two buildings. A tuft of cloud drifted below the moon, underlined it, and then skidded away. Remy was standing at the bedroom window of his apartment, staring out between fire escapes at the buildings across the street. He stepped away from the window and let the curtain fall. He rolled his neck, pulled on a pair of jeans, and checked his watch. It was quarter to four. He sat on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes, checking first to make sure there was no blood on them.

So he would take a walk, to the one place where he might still be able to make sense of things. Remy grabbed his coat off a chair and left his apartment, walked down the hall, down the stairs and out onto the stoop. He looked down the block. It was empty; sidewalks glistened in the dark. The air was cool and clear, as if a new shipment had arrived by truck this morning, the old stuff flushed and packed in garbage cans. From the street, Remy looked up at his apartment window. It was dark and implacable, and he had the odd feeling that he might never see his apartment again. He started walking. The streets shined as from a fresh rain, but the sky was icy clear. He breathed in the morning smells: truck exhaust, sewage, bagels – but he didn’t find that smell, and he was surprised that he couldn’t come up with the odor. When had that happened? He had assumed the smell would never leave him. Now he had only a vague memory of it, but the odor itself was different from its memory, the way melancholy proceeds from sorrow.

Remy stepped between two parked cars and crossed the empty street. He paused when he saw a familiar car parked a block from his apartment, illegally, next to a hydrant. Remy made his way over to it and looked down, to the driver’s seat, where Paul Guterak was leaned back, asleep, snoring lightly, his mouth slightly open. He wore a puffy winter coat, lined with horizontal seams, and binoculars around his neck. Across his lap was a notebook. Remy could see writing on the open pages: “0212: Subject BR returns to apartment. 0224: Lights out.” Remy let his hand linger on the windshield for a moment, then tapped lightly on the window.

Guterak started, looked around, and then up at Remy, confused. Finally, he lowered his window. “Oh. Hey. I was just-” But he couldn’t think of anything.

Remy crouched by the window. “Can I see that?”

“Oh.” He handed Remy the notebook. “Sure. You know… you asked me to-”

“Yeah, I remember,” Remy said. The log went back months, although it skipped days at a time. Each page had a date written on top; beneath the date were three columns, showing in military time where and when Remy went and where and when he left. Remy flipped through the entries and saw April’s apartment, Carla and Steve’s house (“stayed in car”), trips to the library and the courthouse and any number of bars and lounges. He saw Nicole’s apartment and the office of Secure Inc. Twice Paul tracked him to the airport, but didn’t follow him inside. It was strange seeing his life like that, and it was far less mysterious than Remy had expected. He found he remembered just about everything on the log, and he was surprised at how useless it was, seeing the places and times without any context, without any why.

Paul yawned. “I’m sorry it’s not more complete. I did the best I could. I’m pretty rusty. I lost you a lot and I kept forgetting to do it.”

“No. It’s fine,” Remy said. He handed it back through the open window. He looked down on his friend. “Did I tell you how much I liked your commercial?”

“You did? Thanks, man. That means a lot to me.”

“You were great.”

“You didn’t think I looked fat compared to that smoker?”

“No. You looked good.”

“Thanks.” Paul sat up in the driver’s seat and shook his head, as if trying to clear his mind. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” He leaned against the window frame.

Paul looked around, as if worried that someone was listening. “Do you ever feel like things got away from you?”

Remy smiled.

“I was sitting there the other night, with Tara, watching myself in that cereal commercial, and I swear to fuggin’ God, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what happened. I mean, I should be as happy as shit. But the one person I wanted to see it with… was Stacy. Of all the people… that ungrateful cow. But I swear to God… it was like… I had this moment… I honestly didn’t know how I got where I was. Do you know what I mean? Does that ever happen to you?”

“You should go home, Paul,” Remy said quietly.

Guterak nodded. He looked down at the steering wheel, but then looked back up at Remy. “Tara left.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. The commercial aired. I ran out of fuggin’ hair gel. Who knows?” He shrugged. “Maybe I talked too much about that day again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“How come you never talk about it? Every other cop I know talks about it, even if they weren’t there. But you… you never talk about it.”

“I don’t really remember.”

“Nothing?”

“No.” But it wasn’t entirely true. Remy did remember something from that day. Paper. He remembered smoke and he remembered standing alone while a billion sheets of paper fluttered to the ground. Like notes without bottles on the ocean, a billion pleas and wishes sent out on the wind. He remembered walking beneath the long shadows and watching the paper fall as a grumble rose beneath his feet and-

Guterak was staring at him. “The last time I saw you that morning, you were going in. Do you remember that at least?”

“No.”

“We couldn’t get anyone on the fuggin’ radio and it seemed like the evacuation was slowing down. It was just smoke up there, and people falling, jumping… and you said you were gonna go in and get a visual, see where they stood with the evacuation. You were gone fifteen minutes or so… when everything went to shit. I thought for sure we’d lost you, until I saw you that night.”

Remy searched his memory, but there was nothing.

“Sometimes I wish I’d gone in,” Guterak said.

“What are you talking about?”

“When it all started coming down, there was that fire probie… stupid kid ran toward the thing. I passed him – he’s running in while I’m running away.” Guterak’s eyes glistened. “Sometimes I hear people use that word – hero – and I feel… sick.”

“Go home,” Remy said. “Go see Stacy. And your kids.” Then he stood and patted the roof of the car. “And don’t follow me anymore.”

Paul rolled up his window. Remy watched Guterak drive down the block and then he began walking, his shadow growing in the streetlight before him. He moved steadily down the dark sidewalk, careful to stay in the shadows. Above him, the fading rind of moon tailed him down the narrow street. Remy walked south and then east through neighborhoods he’d never seen on foot before, quiet, precise neighborhoods bordered by rows of businesses – copy companies and juice bars and cell phone sales, their façades covered with cages and bars and garage doors. He caught a glimpse of an avenue and the storefronts on it seemed to stretch forever. These had been cobblers and butchers at one time, and printers and razor salesmen and soul food restaurants and record stores and pawnshops, and one day they would be genetic splicers and pet cloners and jet pack distributors. This city. Yes, everyone believes they’ve invented the place, that their time is the only time, and yet the truth was-

THE GROUND is where history lay. They didn’t put the Gettysburg memorial somewhere else. They put it at Gettysburg, or some version of that place, of that ground. They were the same: ground and place – plowed and scraped and rearranged, sure, but still you knew that in this place the soil was tamped with bone and gristle and bravery. That was important. The ground was important, imprinted with every footfall of our lives, the DNA of the profound and the banal, every fight, chase, panhandle, kiss, fall, dog shit, con game, stickball hit, car wreck, bike race, sunset stroll, fish sale, mugging – the full measure and memento of every unremarkable event, and every inconceivable moment. Remy turned from side to side, taking the whole thing in, feeling incomplete, cheated in some way, as if they’d taken away his memory along with the dirt and debris. Maybe his mind was a hole like this – the evidence and reason scraped away. If you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet, what can you trust? If you take away the very ground, what could possibly be left?

And yet that’s what they had done. He stepped back from the fence line and stared out over the place. They took it away. Nothing left here but a hole, a yawning emptiness fifty feet deep, football fields across, transit tracks cutting through the hole like hamster ramps, roads climbing the walls, excavation trails scratched across it, earthmovers and dump trucks, spotlights shining into the emptiness. God, they scraped it all away. No wonder they couldn’t remember what it meant anymore. No wonder they’d gotten it all wrong. How can you remember what isn’t there anymore? Remy leaned over the railing. He looked down the fence line, at rows of dying flowers, at notes of encouragement and defiance left by visitors. It looked like any other place now, like the site of a future business park, or a mall parking lot.

He imagined for a moment that he was in the wrong place. Was this really it? Christ, it seemed so small. Before, it had been vast enough to contain every horror (falling and burning and collapsing)… but that was all gone now. Everything was gone: the silhouetted steel shapes, half-buried I beams, berms of window blinds and powdered concrete, mounds of rubble and jagged window frames, gray undefined rubble, hills and pits of gypsum and cloth and… and steel! Steel forming itself into cathedral walls and sheaths and arches and caverns and trunkless legs of stone, like perfect ruined sculptures.

He had expected to feel something. But what can you feel about a place when that place has been scraped away? What was beneath all those piles? Nothing? No one?

It was just a deep tub now, a concrete-walled construction site, like any of the other sockets in a city that lived by creating such holes, cannibalizing itself block by old block to make way for the new, smoking sockets surrounded by razor-topped construction fences, waiting for buildings to be screwed in – and this the largest socket, a cleaned-up crater ringed by American flags and dead bouquets. Waiting for cranes. Above, the sky was washed out, colors faded like an old movie, everything the dull sallow of new concrete. What’s left of a place when you take the ground away? Is the place even there anymore? If you scratched away the whole island and moved it somewhere else, would the city be where it had been, in the widened channel of opposing estuaries… or would it be in the new place, where you’d moved the ground?

Remy felt the man next to him even before he spoke.

“Aptly named,” he said. “Don’t you think?” Remy turned and really wasn’t surprised to find Jaguar. In the first light of dawn, he got the best look at him he’d ever had. The man was in his sixties, intelligent looking, with a thin, craggy face and close-cropped gray beard and hair. He pulled his long wool coat up around his shoulders, and nodded at the epic construction site before them. “The absence of all magnitude or quantity.”

“What?”

“Zero. The absence of all magnitude or quantity. A person or thing with no discernible qualities or even existence. The point of departure in a reckoning. Zero hour – that sort of thing. A state or condition of total absence. The point of neutrality between opposites. To zero in: to concentrate firepower on the exact range of something. That’s a good one, too, although it’s a bit literal.”

Remy felt in his coat pocket and found two things. His handgun. And the thick envelope from The Boss. His hand moved from one to the other.

The man continued. “But I tell you the best derivation, for my money: zero sum. That’s what we’ve got here, if you ask me. Gains and losses coming out equal. No possible outcome except more of the same. And yet…” The man shrugged. “No. Say what you will. It is a fitting name.”

Remy looked up and saw the edge of moon again, faint now, about to disappear for the day. For the next fifteen hours the moon would be invisible, though of course it would still be there, driving tides and bipolars and the births of babies. And yet they insisted on saying each night that the moon came out, like superstitious men scratching their fear onto cave walls.

“It’s an Arab word,” the man continued. “Zero. From the word sifr. Means empty, like cypher. The world had no concept of zero, of nothingness, until we brought it west. Of course, we stole it from the Hindis. But it had never occurred in the West that there could be a number before one.” He scoffed. “Civilization. They couldn’t even get their minds around the concept of emptiness, of infinity, the circle completing itself. If you can’t count nothing, you can’t conceive of everything. Without zero, you can’t comprehend negative numbers. So you can’t see infinity. There’s no sense to the universe. No negative to balance the positive, no axis on which to turn, no evil to balance the good. Without zero, every system eventually breaks down.”

He nodded, as if convincing himself. “No,” he said again, “it’s the right name.”

Remy swallowed. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m doing what we agreed to do, what you told me to do.”

Remy felt for the gun in his pocket. “I’m not going to let anyone get hurt.”

Jaguar stared at Remy with those implacable eyes. “I am on your side, remember?”

“Is that good or bad?”

The corner of Jaguar’s mouth rose in a smirk. “Point taken.” He cocked his head and seemed to be reading Remy for the first time. “For just a second there you looked like you couldn’t decide whether to pay me or shoot me.”

It sounded like he was joking, but Remy’s hand remained in his pockets, between the gun and the money The Boss had given him. “Does it matter?” Remy asked.

“It matters a little to me,” he said darkly, holding out his hand.

Remy had no idea what to do. “Maybe I should shoot myself,” he said.

“You tried that,” the man said without looking away, his hand still out.

Finally, defeated, Remy handed over the money.

As he counted, Jaguar said, “I’d better not see anyone there.”

Remy said nothing.

“I mean it. No one moves until I’m gone. Right?”

Remy said nothing.

Jaguar looked up. “Look, if I so much as see a patrol car while I’m making the drop, I’m out of there. Do you understand?”

“No… Not at all.”

Jaguar continued: “I sure as hell better not see you there.”

“See me where?” Remy asked quietly, already sensing the answer.

“Good,” Jaguar said. “That’s more like it.” He stuffed the money in his wool coat, tipped his finger to his head, and walked away.

Remy glanced over his shoulder, toward Wall Street, and saw the first tourists edging their way in, mouths open, cameras up. They posed for pictures on either side of a plastic American flag, which had been zip-tied to the railing. Remy watched this for a moment, and then he fell forward, his fingers locked in the wire fence surrounding the hole where the world had been.

THE WIRE room hummed with activity, translators pitched forward, agents coming in and out with printouts, computer screens registering the levels of voices. Remy edged in, breathless, as if he’d just run over here. The room was long and narrow, like a cheap motel conference room, with one bank of windows looking out over the river, the other long wall lined with bookshelves covered with bound books of transcriptions, and on either end of the room a station equipped with a computer registering the levels of digital recording. Translators sat next to technicians, headphones over their ears. Over a speaker, Remy could hear an Arabic drone in the background – “Bism-allah – al-Wadud. Ar-Rahim” – while two other men argued in whispers.

“Name of God loving… and merciful,” the translator said.

“Where have you been?” Markham whispered. “You almost missed it. We got three targets in a hotel room waiting for Jaguar. And then they’re gonna go. We’re listening to Kamal make his suicide videotape. It’s… cool.”

The agent Dave was standing, his head pitched forward like a vulture, looking over the shoulder of the seated translator, a man in his fifties with a dark tangle of black hair, who was concentrating on the drone in the background. He translated in a consonant-heavy English punctuated by pauses and hums: “…as… uh… commanded by Allah… um… something infidels… those who would enslave and uh… what’s the word… seduce…”

“Rape,” yelled the other translator from across the room.

“Right,” said the first translator. “Uh… rape… the Land of the Two Holy Places… the infidel wolf…”

Above the chanting Arabic was the sound of the other two men, whose whispered English was picked up by the wire.

“This is crazy,” said one of the men on the wire, above the background drone. “I am not going to do this.” Remy recognized the voice. It was Mahoud, the restaurant owner.

“Look, just say some crazy shit on the tape,” Bishir whispered back. “You don’t have to do anything after that. Just cover your face, hold the machine gun, and say infidels and wolves and shit like that.”

“No. I can’t do it.”

“Do you see that guy?” Bishir whispered. “Does he look like he’s fucking around? He’ll have us both killed if he thinks we’re backing out.”

In the wire room, Dave was chewing his thumbnail. “Come on, come on. Hold him.”

“But I never intended…” Mahoud began.

“Look, it doesn’t matter what you intended,” Bishir said. “We’re here now. Just make your tape, and then you can run. But if you leave now we’re both dead.”

“That’s right,” said Dave. “Keep him hooked, Bishir. Don’t let anyone out of that room.”

“He’s good,” Markham said in a low voice. “I wish we could’ve afforded someone like that.”

Remy felt the ground spinning.

The translator droned on: “…guide me in the straight path… not the path of those who have incurred the wrath of…”

“We’ve got to stop this,” Remy said.

Markham reached out and grabbed Remy’s arm.

“Is that Remy?” Dave asked. “Look, this is not the time, Remy. We’re trying to work here.”

“Somebody stop this!” Remy yelled.

Dave took a drink of the largest iced coffee drink Remy had ever seen, a pail of coffee and whipped cream. “No one does anything until Jaguar gets there with the bomb.”

“They have a bomb?” Remy asked Markham. He watched as agents and translators moved around the room like ants on ice cream.

“It’s not much of a bomb threat if they don’t have a bomb,” Markham said under his breath.

“We gave them a bomb?”

“The detonator isn’t real,” Markham said.

“This is crazy,” Remy said. He yelled again, “Look! You’ve got to stop this! Right now!”

“All right! That’s it. Get him out of here!” Dave yelled, pointing at Remy without looking back. “You had your chance, Remy. Now leave us alone and let us do our jobs.”

“This is insane!” Remy yelled.

Markham began pulling him by the arm out the door.

“And the seas shall boil,” the translator was saying, “and… uh… every soul shall know what it has done.”

“Wrought,” said another translator.

“Right, wrought,” said the first translator as the door closed behind them.

In the hallway, Markham held Remy by the arm. “What’s wrong with you?”

Remy felt sick. “They’re all our guys.”

“Technically,” Markham said.

“No. They’re all moles. Every one of them.”

“Ye-e-eah,” Markham said, as if Remy had just mentioned that the sun had come up.

“They all work for us.”

“That’s what makes it so perfect. What can go wrong?”

Remy pushed away from Markham and began running down the hallway.

“Brian!” Markham called. “Come back.”

Remy turned the corner and still he heard Markham’s voice. “You’re gonna miss the raid!”

Remy ran out the door, into a long, empty hallway. The door behind him had a name that Remy assumed must be for a phony business – All Field Transit. There was a stairwell on his right. He crashed through it. An alarm went off somewhere, but he kept running down the dark stairs, taking two at a time, down three flights to the first floor. He burst out into a lobby, past a napping security guard, through the revolving door and out onto the street. He stood on the curb mid-block, eyes darting from building to building. Listening posts were often set up nearby; the cell could be meeting in one of these buildings.

It was a rainy morning, cabs jostling for lanes with delivery trucks and limos. He ran down the street. At the corner he stopped and looked both ways, glancing up at windows as if he might see a familiar face in one of them. Then, right in front of him, he saw the silver gypsy cab. The passenger door opened and Buff got out, a cord dangling from his ear, his middle finger on an earpiece.

“Jesus, Remy, should you be on the street? We’re expecting Iceman any minute. You listening to this shit?” he asked, like a teenager who’s found a peephole into a girls’ locker room. “We got three bogies in this hotel room saying prayers and talking crazy. Just like on TV.”

“You need to stop it!”

“Stop it? We got our CI in there and we got people all over the building.” He waved at the buildings. “We got enough snipers for fifty guys. Soon as the last guy shows up, we move.”

“No, no. What if something goes wrong? What if the bomb goes off?”

“No worries. They got a phony detonator.”

“Other way around!” called the other agent from the car.

“Oh, right,” said Buff. “The detonator’s phony. Bomb’s real.”

“No. It’s the other way,” said the other agent from the car again.

Buff ducked his head so he could see inside the car. “Real bomb, phony detonator?”

“No,” the voice said from the car. “You keep saying it the same way. It’s the other way around.”

Buff shrugged. “Anyway, don’t sweat it. We got it under control. Soon as Ice Guy gets here, we move. Fuckers at the agency are gonna shit their pants when we raid their deal.” He hit Remy in the shoulder. “Thanks again, man.”

Remy rubbed his brow.

Just then, the agent in the car leaned across the seat and hissed, “Ice on the pond!”

Remy’s eyes drifted across the street, to where an older Middle Eastern man, face and head clean-shaven, wearing new rectangular glasses, was walking toward the brownstone. He carried an athletic bag over one shoulder and had his wool coat under the other arm. The sidewalk traffic parted and Jaguar reached for the door of the building, his eyes darting about.

“Look natural,” Buff said, and he grabbed Remy in the most unnatural hug Remy had ever felt.

As Jaguar entered the building his head turned a few degrees, his gaze narrowed, and Remy wasn’t sure, but he thought, for just the briefest moment, that Jaguar might’ve seen him.

“Target is inside. Move into positions,” Buff said into his wrist. The other agent eased out of the car and began wading into traffic, as Buff let go of his smothering hug and stepped in behind the other agent.

Remy was left on the sidewalk, his feet glued to the spot. He turned to his left and saw, in the building he’d just left, Dave and Markham and another agent from the wire room emerge on the street. They began crossing the street in the middle of the block, and then Dave turned to look up the street, to where Buff was crossing at the corner, his head bobbing above the cab line.

“Come on. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dave yelped. He began moving faster.

Buff turned, saw Dave and began running for the building.

“Wait,” Remy said helplessly. He looked up to the building Jaguar had gone into and saw two men suddenly appear in the top-floor windows, wearing black Kevlar jackets, rifles strapped across their backs. They began rappelling down the face of the building. “This is crazy,” Remy muttered, to no one. And that’s when the phone at his waist buzzed. He reached down and saw the number. April-

“HELLO?” REMY stood in a crowd, breathing heavily. He was covered in sweat, as if he’d been running. “Hello?”

“Yes?” asked a confused man in return. “Do I know you?” The man had a long burn on his face, like a baby’s footprint. He was sitting on a wheeled trunk.

“Oh. No. I’m sorry. I was just,…” Remy looked around. “Talking to myself.”

“You said ‘Hello’ to yourself?”

“I guess I did.” Remy tore his eye from the man’s face and looked around. He was standing at the gate of a subway station, between MetroCard machines, in front of a map encased in Plexiglas. Remy moved past the confused man to the wall map, which showed subway lines snaking toward the bottom of the island and then going hard left – red, blue, orange, green, and brown – like the plumbing schematic for a high-rise. A huge piece of pale green chewing gum was stuck to the map. After a moment, Remy pulled the gum away and saw the You Are Here arrow. He was at a subway stop at the train station.

Remy turned away from the map. He put his hands to his head, as if he could locate his memory manually. April had called. Yes. Remy pulled his cell phone out, but there was no service down here. His breath shortened; he felt a twinge of the same creeping claustrophobia he’d felt that helpless morning (standing on the street… paper raining… no-service message on his cell…)

Remy looked around wildly. He tried to concentrate, but there was nothing. She had called. Was she leaving on a train? She’d be going west, home to Kansas City, or maybe to San Francisco. Perhaps a bus? The bus depot was only a block away. No, she wouldn’t take a bus. Maybe the train to one of the airports; he remembered there was a line to Newark Airport. The platforms would be across the terminal, two underground blocks away. He tried to remember: Was it New Jersey Transit or Amtrak that went to Newark?

Remy ran down the stairs and sprinted along the tunnel that ran beneath the street. He bumped people at the end of the hallway and was leaping up another set of steps, head clouded with memory (moving slowly up the hot stairwell… coughing stragglers with smoke-stained faces going the other direction) when he spun around a group of soccer players and crashed into a kiosk – like a machine gun nest of consumer goods. And he had the strangest thought as he tried to put the things back that cascaded down around him: magazines and candy bars, pistachios and gum, cigars, razors, pain relievers, batteries, film, pens and pencils (how long could a person survive on the contents of a single kiosk?) “Hey asshole!” said the clerk, but Remy was running up the ramp.

He came into the great terminal, but here he was slowed by the crowd, by streams of subway riders with backpacks and bags and crosscurrents of rail riders with briefcases and rolling suitcases, their faces flipping past his good eye like snapshots. Though he’d grown used to having a blind side, now and then he still bumped someone and mumbled his apologies. He stopped in the middle of the huge terminal for a moment, surrounded by travelers, their voices low and humming, like droning bees on a nest. Something felt wrong, and familiar (turning back suddenly… stopping on the stairs… trickle of people moving down…).

The crowds thinned and Remy ran across the terminal toward the ticket windows for the commuter trains – NJ Transit and LIRR and Amtrak. A handful of people were waiting on lines at the ticket windows. A woman was wrangling two boys in matching Giants jerseys. One of them looked up at Remy and covered his left eye.

(emerging into the empty plaza… white paper and smoking pieces of steel and bodies… and for the briefest moment he was alone, paper falling… he’d never heard the city so quiet… and then: a deep, low moan…)

He bounced from window to window, reading the train schedules, the list of departures: Trenton and the NE Corridor. Dover. New Brunswick. The Acela Express.

“Where the hell is Newark?” he yelled. People on line turned and stared at him. Finally he found the gate number, and was turning to run when he heard a familiar jingle.

April! He had service again. Remy nearly dropped the phone pulling it out.

“Where are you?” Remy asked.

“Where do you think I am? Making myself scarce.” It was Markham. “I assume you’re shredding documents. That’s what I’m headed to do. Obviously… any work you did for us no longer exists.”

“What?”

“God, what a mess that was. The bureau and agency are gonna say it was some kind of joint operation, but it was a clusterfuck is what it was. Twenty competing agents busting in doors and swinging through windows, dropping through vents. The crossfire was nuts. Two bureau guys got hit. They’re lucky they were wearing vests and that the targets were the only ones… you know… neutralized-”

“You killed them?” Remy’s head fell to his chest.

“Well… yeah,” Markham said: another stupid question from Remy. “They were making suicide videos. They were holding a machine gun, Brian.”

“You got all of them?”

“All but Jaguar. They figure he got spooked by something because he never made it up to the apartment. He got on the elevator but they think he got off on two, went down the stairs and slipped out a loading dock in the back. But they don’t think he got far. I would not want to be that guy right now. It’s only a matter of time.” And then he paused. “You know, the more I think about it… maybe you can race time. But I don’t think you can win.”

Remy surprised himself by hanging up. It was as if his hand snapped the phone shut on its own – as if his hand had finally had enough of this lunacy. He stuffed the phone in his pocket. He felt the urge to leave. Find April and just go with her, wherever she was going. Maybe back to San Francisco. He edged his way through the crowd. Markham called again, but he ignored it. He moved through the station, watching the flow of people. And then Remy recalled Jaguar’s stare. All but Jaguar. And then came an awful thought: Soft target. Crowds. Major disruptions. Easy media access. Home videos and camera phones to maximize the horror. He stopped and looked around the train station.

He was here to find April-

Soft target.

– wasn’t he? His phone was ringing again. It wasn’t Markham’s number. Or April’s. He opened it and held it to his head.

The voice was slick and cold but didn’t seem angry. “Did you follow me, Brian?”

Remy looked around the station again. “Listen-”

“No. You should listen to me.” Jaguar spoke in his steady lecturer’s voice, a tone that Remy recognized from their other meetings: “For on that day there will be shining faces, blithe with joy, and there will be faces blackened with dust – the faces of the faithless and the graceless.”

“Look,” Remy said. “I swear… I didn’t-” But he didn’t know what he had done, or what he hadn’t done. “Where are you?” He scanned the crowd. “Are you here?” He spun around slowly.

A couple in matching sweatsuits, holding hands-

A woman with headphones pushing a baby stroller-

Two young men in scrubs, holding paper coffee cups-

“You know, it’s ironic,” Jaguar said over the phone. “I used to tell my students that there are a hundred ninety-two mentions of Allah’s compassion in the Koran. And only seventeen instances of his vengeance. And yet, it is always the vengeance that seduces. Just like here. You claim to follow a simple prophet of poverty and compassion and build temples celebrating riches and power.”

“Where are you?” Remy asked again.

“It occurred to me when I saw you talking to that agent on the street, when I realized that I was being betrayed-”

“No-” Remy began, but Jaguar kept talking.

“It occurred to me that I’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe power and vengeance… are exactly what we should build temples to. We marvel at the zealotry of a man who would blow himself up for a cause. But imagine, too, the desperation. The fear. And maybe even something alluring – something… primal.”

Remy continued to spin slowly.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” Jaguar asked. “This?”

Two girls in Catholic jumpers-

A fat man in custodian’s coveralls-

“Let’s go somewhere and talk. You and me.”

“You and me,” Jaguar said. “Yes. We had interesting talks. Here’s something we can talk about: Does a man ever realize that he has been the villain of his own story?”

Remy wasn’t sure which one of them he meant.

“Perhaps on his deathbed?” Jaguar asked. “Does he realize it then?”

Remy looked over his shoulder:

An old couple wearing matching silk coats-

A banger in a Bulls jersey-

“All along,” Jaguar said, “I was the target?”

Remy started to say that he didn’t know. But he was tired of saying that. “I’m not sure it even mattered,” he said finally.

“And the others?”

“They all worked for us. None of them knew about the others.”

Jaguar was quiet for a moment. Then he asked “Why?” quietly, without bitterness.

Again, Remy wanted to say that he didn’t know. But that just didn’t seem true any more. “Hunger,” Remy said.

The phone went dead. “Hello?” Remy rubbed his cheekbone. “Hello!” He spun again. He was standing in the heart of the station terminal, at the center of this swirling maze of faces, all of them looking to him – and, finally, he had nothing left. His arms went to his sides and his head fell back.

And that’s when he saw April.

She was wearing a pea coat and a woolen cap, straining with two heavy wheeled suitcases, moving down a ramp toward the waiting area for the New Jersey Transit trains. And if there was nothing else, he thought, perhaps there was escape.

“April!” Remy ran toward her, jumping a railing, following the line of departing trains. But he couldn’t see where she’d gone.

He ran down the stairs toward the outdoor platforms. He caught a glimpse of her two platforms away, separated by two sets of rail lines, stepping into a shelter. She pulled her suitcases in behind her. “April!” he called again.

He ran up the stairs, back down the ramp and down the other stairs, his hand sliding down the railing. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he paused for a moment on the narrow platform. The glass shelter was fogged; he couldn’t see inside.

He looked down the track – no train yet – then made his way toward the glass shelter. The automatic doors slid open. There were only a handful of people inside, sitting on plastic chairs, reading newspapers and paperback books. One man was talking on a cell phone.

April’s suitcases were stacked in front of her. In one hand she was holding her ticket up, as if it might be collected any time. In the other hand she held a train schedule she was reading. Her pea coat was pulled up tight around her throat. She looked up slowly, taking him in with her dark, imploring eyes. The ticket slipped from her hand but she didn’t seem to notice, and her hand remained raised, graceful, half-open, as if she were awaiting a dance partner. Then her eyes shifted a few degrees, so that she was looking over his shoulder.

Remy turned to follow the path of her vision, and through the open door he saw Jaguar coming down the steps to the platform. His face was wet and lined. His gray wool coat was bunched up around him, as if he had something bulky beneath it. And there was something in his hand, a phone, maybe.

Remy turned back to April and opened his mouth to say something – but she was staring at him with such a look of… forgiveness that it took his breath away and he only wished he could stay forever in that moment.

“You came,” she said-

NOTHING MORE than air at first. And it wasn’t so bad. He’d read somewhere that buildings, too, were mostly air. Maybe that was the truly dangerous part: air. Maybe the rest was manageable, the steel and paper and people. Maybe it was the air you had to watch out for. It sucked inward, Remy with it, and then thrust out, like a bellows, the way the ocean gathers water for a crashing wave. When it came, the blast at Remy’s back wasn’t hot or cold. It had no qualities other than sheer insistence; noise filled every space, concussive and sharp, not a boom but a crack, heavy with glass, and accompanied a split second later by the deep thud he’d expected, a resounding bass thunder like someone trying to frighten him to death, and a blinding flash and then finally, when he could stand the noise no longer, the heat came – searing – and he was airborne, free, light… like paper, tossed and blown with the other falling bits and frantic sheets, smoking, corners scorched, flaring in the open air until there was nothing left but a fine black edge… then gone, a hole and nothing but the faint memory of a seething black that unfurled, that lifted him and held him briefly on the warmest current-

IT WAS dark. No flashers or floaters. Nothing. Brian Remy dreamed or imagined that he was dreaming: He was on his stomach, staring down from the sky as great seams opened and people vanished into the rips. He dreamed that people ignored the tears in the sky and went about their business, filed their taxes, and that every once in a while one of them would fall up, disappear into the cracks, like falling into a manhole, and the rest would just go on with their lives. And he dreamed that people paused on the street, looked up and spoke to him in muffled voices, asking how he was doing and if he could hear them.

He dreamed that a woman sat next to his bed and held his hand.

April?

No, it’s me, said March Selios.

You got out?

I was the last one.

Where are you?

Here. We’re all here. We’ve always been here.

Is April…

But the woman’s voice changed. “This is going to hurt a little,” she said, still holding his hand. And in the dream he was lowered into a scalding bath, and the pain broke him and later, in the darkness, he dreamed that he was spread out on his stomach on a board, and that people moved pins in and out of his back, perhaps marking the movements of armies in battle. He dreamed that people jabbed him with needles and poured liquid fire on his skin and then asked if he could feel it. He knew better than to answer questions in dreams and so he lay there, dreaming that they tugged on pieces of skin from the backs of his arms and legs, and that they removed tiny squares to sell to tourists. It wasn’t bad, this dreaming… the gaps were fluid and he no longer lurched, but skipped from moment to moment with no anxiety, no expectation of comprehension.

He dreamed of Edgar as a baby, but with a tree trunk for a neck.

And the dreams became even more outlandish: hushed conversations and bedside ceremonies, imaginary doctors offering absurd treatments. In one dream, they rolled him onto his back, just long enough to pin some kind of medal on him, before rolling him over again. In another dream, they moved him to a new room, and people rolled him from side to side, and he dreamed that they gave him a roommate, a man burned in a truck fire, and that they put a television on for them both, a television that turned its own channels – slipping insanely from one reality to another, so that just as he got interested in the sound of strong men lifting kegs of beer a gap would interrupt things and he would find himself on the other side listening to an argument about gay adoption between a minister and a transvestite. And he dreamed that the man in his room, the man burned in a truck fire, told him to “Holler if you hear something that sounds good.” But Remy knew better, and the television skipped happily from rising poll numbers to the winners of ballroom dancing competitions, from a double date between teenagers to men worrying about the rate of inflation. And Remy recognized that this had been his condition. This was what life felt like. This.

The televised dreams were especially clever the way they could skip away from anything unpleasant, go from death to music videos, and pass on information without informing. The way they could jump from channel to channel, from site to site, from wrenching tragedy to absurd comedy, with only the laugh track to differentiate them. One day he dreamed two men debating whether the recent bounce in The President’s popularity was entirely due to the recent victory over a terrorist cell, in which four of the five members were killed and only one bomb was detonated… on a mostly empty train platform… killing only six… including the bomber… and severely wounding a retired police officer-

And when the dream television was off, Remy imagined that people came to see him – Guterak talking about his new job as spokesman for a tear gas company; Edgar shuffling his feet and mumbling that he had to get back to his base; The Boss pausing during a cell phone conversation long enough to ask if Remy was going to make it.

Dream trays of food came and went, and people asked if he needed anything, and through it all Remy clung to sleep. He knew that if she were right, and this had all been a kind of fever dream, that he should just stay in it and she would have to come. Life skipped along – snowboard races and cooking competitions and manatee rescues. “Holler if you hear something that sounds good.”

And one day he dreamed that his roommate was sent home. A window was open and he could smell burning leaves, and hear horns outside and the sounds of grinding traffic. The TV that day was offering a particularly insane dream in which grown-up child stars ate insects in an allotted amount of time. A nurse was laughing as she carefully removed the tape and gauze from his face. “That boy is crazy,” she said. “I used to love him on the TV. You ever watch that show he was on?” When the last of the gauze came off, Remy could feel the light behind one eyelid, and he could see the old flecks in his good eye. It was the most heartbreaking thing he’d ever seen.

“Okay,” she asked quietly, “Do you want to try to open your eyes now?”

But he squeezed them as tight as he could, waiting for her to come.