"This...?"

Dr. Cyril Clausich pointed his gray eyes at the mirror, scrutinizing the even grayer hairs in his tousled white hair and beard. An unexpected coal-black fiber stood out, not because it was black, but because of its location. Perhaps it was due to stress. Or rather, to frustration.

He lived as a hermit in a huge two-story house of varnished wood, wedged among vegetation next to the beach, somewhere in the golden and green island of Bonaire. An island which had all the welcoming warmth of the Caribbean, without having to put up with the irritating hordes of screaming children and overweight tourists. He had moved there in search of a peace he didn't enjoy, devoting his sleep and wakefulness to his books and notes, organized on shelves or stacked up in columns high enough to kiss the ceiling. His neat library was divided into rooms: a room for biology, another for medicine, another for history, another for theology, and one last room for miscellany. He had spent his first years here rereading works and pointing out concepts in them, then commenting in several papers about his interpretation. He never suspected that eventually, he would start pointing out concepts in his own comments and performing profuse essays on his interpretations of those. Whatever that was, he thought, that had to have been a point of no return.

And between those bundles he lived thoroughly imbued, oblivious to the cold and the iron curtain, to red buttons and mutual destruction. Memories of his childhood and adolescence in London had become broken fragments of an increasingly clouded glass, as if it had all been a vanishing dream. That did not stop him from preserving his immaculate British accent. He didn't even remember how long he had been here, as if his notion of time had stagnated in synchrony with the primordial place. He knew not the day or the time; those axioms became surprisingly useless once one defected from life in a community. He only returned to civilization when he went to the city to replenish his food and books for the months to come. Apart from that, he lived as a savage. A savage with hot water.

"That's no place to be."

He grabbed that black hair and ripped it mercilessly from his ear, as if wanting to send a message. He loaded his fishing rod over his shoulder and his box of baits and hooks in his hand, and he paced to the beach in his bare feet. The boat was there. It was always there. Never once had he needed to worry about it. He dragged it from the cove to the first breaking waves and then hopped in it, unlocking the grip of the stainless-steel rowlocks on the oars and sliding them towards him. Then he sat, facing backwards, and paddled his way to the pure sea, fading with it to the beat of the primal waters laving the wood.

                                             *****

And then he opened his eyes. He had fallen asleep in the boat. Three hours of fishing had left him worn out, giving him an excuse to take one of those delicious naps at the mercy of a diligent sea and a silky breeze, like a mother who rocks a cradle affectionately. The sun was about to meet once again with the horizon, projecting its gilded wake across the copper sea.

He sat up and tried to make out the exact northeast with his raw eyesight. The second quarter of the impending darkness. His mind drifted off. Then he came back. He grabbed hold of the oars and stroked back towards the coast.

Everything constituting that day could be considered an exact copy of the previous ones. Everything was exactly the same. Everything except for that guy in a suit on the beach, staring at the boat in the distance with his hands in his pockets, right next to the mark in the sand where Cyril beached every day. Cyril had lived long enough and had chosen a place isolated enough to know very well that this was by no means a coincidence. He decided to continue his planned route, running aground at the same point and letting the man say what he had to, aware that it was impossible to run away from situations such as this.

The boat came quickly to shore. He pretended not to have seen the other man as he paddled back to the beach, trying to use up every inch of sand. But when he got out of the boat and turned around, he found, much to his dismay, that the man was still there.

"Didn't hook anything today?" asked the man with artificial kindness. His posture, however, couldn't hide a certain displeasure to be there, possibly a result of the sand fouling his burnished shoes.

"I don't hunt. I throw them back into the sea."

Cyril dragged the boat up to the mark in the sand, peering sideways at the man in his thirties, clean-shaven chin and brown curtained hair. His dark eyes betrayed the glance of a predator.

"You don't want them to suffer."

"No one does."

The man showed a half smile empty of meaning.

"If you sympathize with fish, I don't even want to think about how you' feel about people. Especially those you know.

Cyril raised an eyebrow.

"Like who?"

The man loosened his tie knot slightly and tucked his hand back into his pocket in a triumphalist mood.

"What if I say, Doctor Clausich, that Norton needs your help?"

Cyril shook his head with indifference.

"I already told him I had my fill. Honestly, I expected not to see him, or anyone else, ever again."

"Well, I hope you didn't bet on that. He's worsened."

"That was expected."

"No, it's not what you think. There's been an accident. His health's breaking down. The clock's ticking."

Cyril took the rod and the bait box and headed for home.

"Ask someone else."

The man did not bother to try blocking his way. He knew he'd won the battle from the get-go.

"I'm afraid it's not a request, like you think," he responded with a mixture of condescension and threat.

Cyril stopped in his tracks.

"Now that I think about it, how did you find me?"

"As far as I know, you get a good alimony from the government of the United States. Alimony which is managed personally by Norton, by the way. If the NSA's not able to track the trail of an account that it administers, then this organization's as useless as people think it is. And, if he doesn't make it, I don't know who'll sign off on the authorization to transfer you money religiously."

Cyril sighed with disgust, facing a dead end. He knew the only reason Norton sent a diplomat to co-opt him, instead of the worst group of thugs from the CIA to take him against his will, was simply the old friendship between the two of them.

"And what the hell do you want me to do?"

"Come with us. We'll pick you up tomorrow morning. Just pack the basics in a suitcase, and we'll take care of the rest."

The man put a hand on Cyril's shoulder.

"Do it for a friend. Besides," he looked around him, "I'd be eager to leave this place and go back to the trenches if I were you. When the cab arrives, just say my name, and the driver will do the rest." The man extended his hand. "The name's Chambers. Dennis Chambers."

"Nice to meet you, Chambers, Dennis Chambers," answered Cyril sarcastically as he shook the man's hand with the same strength he hated him. "Nice."