Lenny decided his reservoir of sympathy was deep enough for everyone there, and silently wished them well. He ate, savoring each scrumptious mouthful of food. Nothing was as bad as it seemed if you gave it a little consideration. Look at his problem, for example. A few bites of sandwich ago it had looked hopeless. Insurmountable. A few bites later, and he had a feeling he’d come upon a solution.
“Gord,” he said to the waitress’s wide, receding back. “I’m calling Gordian.”
Hasul stood at his office window and watched the Durango enter the parking lot five stories below. The slide of its headlights over the pavement, pale yellow on black, was a small observational pleasure that did not escape his appreciation, as few such pleasures would.
Only the shielding on his plate glass window allowed it.
At this late hour his regular employees were gone, driven off to the comforts of home and family, leaving the expansive lot unoccupied except for a handful of vehicles used by Hasul and his inner cadre. The 4×4 went straight up to where they were lined perpendicular to the building entrance and slipped into the first vacant stall at the end of the row. Then its headlamps went out, a door swung open, and its driver emerged into the blue-white radiance of mercury vapor lights at the far side of the lot. Arranged in a single bank, they shone down from almost a hundred feet in the air like the lights of an outdoor sports arena. With Hasul’s direct exposure to them restricted, their height and distance mitigated any threat from ultraviolet emissions.
Out in the lot, the driver leaned against the front of his 4×4 and finished a half-smoked cigarette. Hasul noted how its tip flared orange with his deep inhalations, bright specks of not-quite-spent tobacco scattering into the wind as he tapped at the head of ash.
After a minute the driver flicked his stub to the blacktop, crushed it out with his shoe bottom, took a quick look around, and started toward the building entrance. A tall whip of a man, he moved with loose-legged, almost bouncing strides, his shadow stretched long in front of him.
Hasul did not leave the window at once. Instead he reached out to touch the smooth glass, his fingertips meeting their own faint reflections. Darkness had swallowed the countryside mere yards beyond the paved rectangle illuminated by the arc lights. The ice-chandelier treetops of its surrounding woods, the snow-encrusted ground between them, the roadway that wound uphill toward the building… he could see none of them under the starless sky and felt something close to the separation, the otherness that normally marked his daylight periods. It was a drastic contrast from the exhilarated feeling Hasul had known hours before, but as one who fancied himself a collector of rare moments, capturing and preserving them as some did exotic butterflies, he realized the lows that gripped him the hardest were often a price he must pay for his memorable highs.
Hasul kept his fingers pressed against the glass now, remembering his walk beneath dusk’s heavy overcast. He had left the office building hooded and gloved, a face guard draping down from bridge of his nose, protective sunglasses with side panels over his eyes. His pulse had raced with expectancy. As he did on the rarest occasions — no more than twice, perhaps three times a year — Hasul had decided in his approximate way to know the world as one who was altogether part of it.
For a while he had paused on a hammock near the edge of the trees and looked west in the direction of the expiring sun. At the distant limit of his vision, the clouds above the mountain humps were stained the color of old bruises. Hasul had seen the vapor of his rapid breaths puff into the winter air through his face guard’s mesh ventilation panel, his excitement increasing as the latest precious moment to be caught in hand raced up on him.
It was no sudden urge, that wish to feel the cold against his skin. Indeed, Hasul’s earliest memories consisted of the excruciating lessons of impulsiveness. The constant forethought and rigorous preparation for which he was lauded in the scientific research community were not, in his eyes, points of pride but absolute necessity.
As he stood out in the gloaming, Hasul had unclipped his portable dosimeter from his coat pocket, held it before him to determine that the UV level was within a comparably tolerable range, and set its timer function for thirty seconds. Caution relaxing its leash on him just so far, he had worn 100 SPF sunblock makeup tinted to match his flesh tone and applied a thick layer of cream to his lips.
His physicians would have crowed in disapproval regardless, not to fault them. Their job was to butler his health. But Hasul had already given them forty-eight years worth of validation, some of it aided by chance, since it was probable he would have died in childhood had his genetic defect not been the variant type… and still that wasn’t truly the point. In the end nothing escaped decay, flesh least of all, and he saw human longevity for the illusion it was. The body was perishable; only its spirit was eternal. Five years, fifty, a hundred — the difference between one life span and another did not amount to a murmur in the flowing river of time. Hasul had calculated and been willing to accept that each exposure would have consequences along the way. What mattered was that he remain true to the plan for which he was created, and this he had done, sparing none of his wealth and ability. Following God’s will through personal discipline, Hasul was soon to reach the culmination of his purpose in this world.
Today at dusk he had permitted himself thirty seconds of release.
No more, no less.
With a quick motion, Hasul had pulled the guard down below his chin. His head thrown back, arms outspread, he stood on his mound of earth and let the trailing remnants of the sunlight press against his naked face. The sound of blood rushing in his ears had been so loud, a thunderous roar beneath which his awareness had been briefly submerged, swept away like a soul in the eternal river.
And then the warning tones of his dosimeter, sounding into the tide.
Now Hasul stepped back from the window, watched his reflection withdraw into the black of night like a disembodied spirit, staring, its hand extended as if groping for the glass’s fixed solidity. He turned away and looked across his desk, his eye catching a slip of movement outside the mouth of an artificial rock cave in the large aquarium tank built into the wall to his right. In the opposite corner of the room, a broad, dark-suited man sat at a closed circuit digital surveillance console, his attention fixed on its flat panel monitor.
Hasul noticed his frown.
“Zaheer,” he said. “Something troubles you.”
“May I speak freely?”
“Please.”
Zaheer nodded toward the display.
“This kaffir who comes to see you,” he said. His use of the Islamic term for nonbelievers was full of disdain. “I fear his inclusion is a mistake.”
Hasul strode up to the console and studied the wide screen image. It showed three men in the ground-floor entry vestibule. Two were members of the Cadre, Aasim passing a handheld weapons detector over their visitor’s rangy frame, Qamal standing by in guarded readiness.
“He has proven capable and worthy of his reputation,” Hasul said.
“More than any of our own?”
“You know what lies ahead of us,” Hasul said. And then inserted the expedient half-truth. “No contribution will be greater than yours in coming days.”
Zaheer held stiffly silent, his eyes on the monitor.
Down in the vestibule, Aasim finished wanding the visitor and accompanied him through an inner door into the main lobby. Zaheer pressed a channel-selection key on his digital multiplexer and the CCD-TV screen view shifted to an overhead of the elevator bank, where the two men entered a waiting car.