Niceville

you? Why not?”
    Chu studied Bock for a while.
    “I won’t make it a big lecture. I will keep it simple. Aside from a very strong personal reason which has to do with the animosity between myself and my older brother, who is something of a gangster in Macao, it is simply that in America I am a free man. In China, on the other hand, I am a snot-rag. I can be nose-blown upon and tossed away by anyone with power over me. China is not a free place. Everybody knows that it is a
busy
place, a beehive nation of industry, with lots of money being made. Nobody in the West cares how that nation of industry treats its people. In China it is possible now to prosper but itis not possible to live without fear of the government. The government has absolute power over everyone. If you are not pleasing the government terrible things will happen to you without warning and without hope of the slightest mercy. This is no way for a human to live. It is degrading. It makes cowards of the good people. And cringing informants of the rest. I refuse to live like this.”
    Here he paused, going quiet, seeing something dark, and the shadow of it flitted across his unmarked face. He shook it off, brightened.
    “So, in spite of the difficulties of my present employment—I work for a most unpleasant man—here is still better than there, and I am not going back to China to live like a serf just because Byron Deitz doesn’t like me.”
    “Byron Deitz? I’ve heard of him.”
    “Yes? A powerful figure in Niceville?”
    “Yeah. Owns a big security company.”
    “Yes. He does. He is my boss. He is also a traitor to your country. And we are going to punish him.”
    “We?”
    “Yes. You and I.”
    “How?”
    It took Chu a few minutes to explain. At the end of it, Bock had multiple objections but they could be succinctly conveyed by the two phrases
No fucking way
and
Are you totally fucking nuts?
    “Yes,” said Andy Chu, with a smile. “I am.”

Lenore
    After his call to Kate, Dillon Walker located a text file on his computer and hit PRINT . Outside the window of his office in the Preston Library a soft afternoon light lay on the drill square and the old Federal-style buildings.
    The weather had been fine all that day, cool and clear, with just a shadow of cloud along the top of the Blue Ridge.
    He could hear, through the half-open window of his book-lined study, the rhythmic cadence of a cadet platoon running through the grounds, the steady tramp of their feet like a muffled drum on the quad, the words as familiar to him as when he had first learned to chant them himself, as a young soldier in the 101st Airborne so many years ago. He listened for a moment longer to the chant. His hands on the keyboard in front of him were knotted and bent with arthritis, barely able to type. It was hard to see them as they had been on that June day in 1944, firmly clutching his parachute straps as he floated down into a firestorm at Normandy. He had not known it at the time, but he had been within a mile of his friend Gray Haggard, who was at that same moment trying not to drown in the bloody foam off Omaha Beach.
    The running cadence faded into the distance and a cool wind stirred the blinds, making them rattle in their traces and fluttering his papers on the broad rosewood desk.
    Someone called his name, softly, from out in the dim corridor of the library, beyond his office door. This was odd, since the place was closed on Saturday afternoons, all the cadets out on an exercise, the library usually deserted.
    He sat back in his creaking chair, cocked an ear. “Hello? I’m in here? Who is it?”
    Silence, and then it came again, a soft whispering voice, at once familiar and very strange.
    A muscle in his cheek quivered and he put a finger to his throat, feeling the carotid throb.
    He was seventy-four and although he had nothing in particular wrong with him, that was just another way of saying that
everything
was wrong with him.
    The voice was a voice he knew, although he had not heard it for years. It was Lenore, and this was why, as a rational man, he was checking his pulse, since he was apparently having some sort of seizure.
    He reached out for the water bottle on the credenza behind him and sipped at it, fumbling in a drawer for an aspirin. The voice spoke again, closer now, and a slender figure appeared on the other side of the pebbled glass door of his office.
    He watched the figure, young, female, dressed in either a white form-fitting dress or