Breathless

will need two hours. At three-thirty, Mr. Adams, I will need two hours to debrief you. I am punctual. Please also be.”
    When Jardine turned his back on them to leave, Merlin issued a single bark so loud it rattled the windows as much as it rattled the deputy director. He jumped, blasphemed, but wouldn’t give the wolfhound the satisfaction of looking back at him.
    While Grady went through the house, surrendering his guns to the agents with duffel bags, Cammy sat on the kitchen floor, telling Merlin that he was excellent, noble, true of heart, and wise.
    As the agents departed, Cammy accompanied them and Grady onto the front porch. Several inflatable tentlike structures swelledinto shape across the yard and in the meadow, the interlocking plastic grids serving as their floors and as the walkways between them.
    “Sleeping quarters, mess hall, latrine, communications center, conference space,” one of the agents explained as they descended the porch steps.
    Cammy stood at the railing with the wolfhound and with the sniper who shot words and bullets with equal marksmanship.
    He said, “It’s like some circus from Hell is setting up for a two-day stand. They don’t have any elephants, their acts are boring, and their clown isn’t funny.”
    “Vivisection. Dissection of a living animal. What
if that’s
on their agenda? What’s going to happen to Puzzle and Riddle?”
    “Nothing.”
    “But they’re already gone.”
    “They’re not gone. They’re here.”
    “I don’t see us getting them back.”
    “I do,” he said.
    “How?”
    “Somehow.”

Fifty-three

T he grenades made Henry Rouvroy happy. He had worried that the haiku-writing sonofabitch had looted the Land Rover. If the grenades had fallen into the mysterious poet’s hands, the balance of power would have shifted dramatically against Henry.
    He enjoyed sitting on the living-room floor, staring at the grenades, handling the grenades, and even kissing them. The casing of a hand grenade was actually a steel waffle of shrapnel waiting to be blown apart and rip savagely through the bodies of everyone within range. It was a beautiful thing.
    The senator, whom Henry had served as chief aide and political strategist, had acquired considerably more ordnance than Henry could have dreamed of getting his hands on, but right now the grenades and his cache of firearms were enough. When civil order collapsed, the senator would be at a specially prepared retreat, one of many that were well-concealed and protected for the highest of high government officials. He expected Henry to come with him and his family to ride out the half year or year of blood in thestreets. But Henry knew in his bones that the social tension in a remote and fortified compound with a slew of politicians and their kin could lead only to paranoid suspicion, ferocious infighting, and eventually cannibalism. While allowing the senator to think he was in for the plan, he made plans of his own. Henry didn’t want to be eaten alive.
    Now he began to distribute the grenades throughout the house, hiding them under cushions, in drawers, under chairs. If his enemy launched an assault on the place, Henry wanted to have a grenade always within arm’s reach, so he could open a window and surprise the hell out of the bastard, blow his booty off and put an end to this game. He hid twenty-nine grenades and decided to carry the last one with him everywhere he went until he killed his tormentor.
    When he finished, he noticed the disgusting filth under his fingernails. He didn’t know how he could have gotten so grimy just unloading the Rover. Manual labor was such dirty work, it was amazing that the blue-collar class didn’t lose millions a year to pestilence and disease.
    He returned to the bathroom, drew a sinkful of hot water, and set to work with cheaply scented soap and with the clever brush that he had discovered the previous night. He scrubbed diligently for forty minutes before his hands were clean enough to satisfy him. His nails were white and shiny.
    As he dried his hands, he wondered if something more than a desire for cleanliness drove him to wash his hands until they were fiery red from hot water and bristle abrasion. Having graduated from Harvard, he knew quite a lot about psychology. Excessive washing of the hands could be a subconscious acknowledgment ofguilt. Perhaps murdering his brother had affected him more deeply than he thought.
    Well, what was done could not be undone. One thing