Shadowfires

made the wrong decision.”
    Dr. Werfell did not exactly recoil from Sharp's touch, but he looked sickened by it. His expression did not change when he looked from Sharp to Jerry Peake.
    Peake winced.
    Werfell led them out of the untenanted room, down the hospital
corridor, past the nurses' station-where Alma Dunn watched them warily while pretending not to look-to the private room where Sarah Kiel remained sedated. As they went, Peake noticed that Werfell, who had previously seemed to resemble Dashiell Hammett and who had looked tremendously imposing, was now somewhat shrunken, diminished. His face was gray, and he seemed older than he had been just a short while ago.
    Although Peake admired Anson
Sharp's ability to command and to get things done, he did not see how he could adopt his boss's
methods as his own. Peake wanted not only to be a successful agent
but to be a legend, and you could be a legend only if you played fair
and still got things done. Being infamous was not at all the
same as being a legend, and in fact the two could not coexist. If he
had learned nothing else from five thousand mystery novels, Peake had
at least learned that much.
    Sarah Kiel's room was silent except for her slow and slightly wheezy breathing, dark but for a single softly glowing lamp beside her bed and the few thin beams of bright desert sun that burned through at the edges of the heavy drapes drawn over the lone window.
    The three men gathered around the bed, Dr. Werfell and Sharp on
one side, Peake on the other.
    “Sarah,” Werfell said quietly. “Sarah?” When she didn't respond, the physician repeated her name and gently shook her shoulder.
    She snorted, murmured, but did not wake.
    Werfell lifted one of the
girl's eyelids, studied her pupil, then held her wrist and timed her pulse. “She won't
wake naturally for… oh, perhaps another hour.”
    “Then do
what's necessary to wake her now,” Anson Sharp said impatiently. “We've
already discussed this.”
    “I'll administer an injection to counteract,” Werfell said, heading toward the closed door.
    “Stay here,” Sharp said. He indicated the call button on the cord
that was tied loosely to one of the bed rails. “Have a nurse bring
what you need.”
    “This is questionable treatment,” Werfell said. “I won't ask any nurse to be involved in it.” He went out, and the door sighed slowly shut behind him.
    Looking down at the sleeping girl, Sharp said, “Scrumptious.”
    Peake blinked in surprise.
    “Tasty,” Sharp said, without raising his eyes from the girl.
    Peake looked down at the unconscious teenager and tried to see
something scrumptious and tasty about her, but it
wasn't easy. Her blond hair was tangled and oily because she was perspiring in her drugged sleep, her limp and matted tresses were unappealingly sweat-pasted to forehead, cheeks, and neck. Her right eye was blackened and swollen shut, with several lines of dried and crusted blood radiating from it where the skin had been cracked and torn. Her right cheek was covered by a bruise from the corner of her swollen eye all the way to her jaw, and her upper lip was split and puffy. Sheets covered her almost to the neck, except for her thin right arm, which had to be exposed because one broken finger was in a cast; two fingernails had been cracked off at the cuticle, and the hand looked less like a hand than like a bird's
long-toed, bony claw.
    “Fifteen when she first moved in with Leben,” Sharp said softly.
“Not much past sixteen now.”
    Turning his attention from the sleeping girl to his boss, Jerry
Peake studied Sharp as Sharp studied Sarah Kiel, and he was not
merely struck by an incredible insight but whacked by it so
hard he almost reeled backward. Anson Sharp, deputy director of the
DSA, was both a pedophile and a sadist.
    Perverse hungers were apparent in the man's hard green eyes and predatory expression. Clearly, he thought Sarah was scrumptious and tasty not because she looked so great right now but because she was only sixteen and badly battered. His rapturous gaze moved lovingly over her blackened eye and bruises, which obviously had as great an erotic impact upon him as breasts and buttocks might have upon a normal man. He was a tightly controlled sadist, yes, and a pedophile who kept his sick libido in check, a pervert who had redirected his mutant needs into wholly acceptable channels, into the aggressiveness and ambition that had swiftly carried him almost to the top of the agency,