"I...can't...believe it," he said in drowned whispers.

"We're still on it, sir," the informant went on with all the strength his voice could manage.

"If it wasn't...for all...the painkillers...in me now...you'd be in serious trouble."

"But sir, it was someone from the Secret Service. No one could've seen that coming."

Norton tried to sit up in the bed, without success. He was painfully aware of his health worsening by the hour.

"You've said...you have...good news, too."

"Yessir. Chambers has turned Clausich, and they're on their way now."

"Then tell Chambers...to redirect to Fort Meade."

"But there's no need..."

"This place isn't safe. There've been too many...things. Prepare your luggage...we're going back home...ASAP. Notify Chambers."

The informant departed as soon as Norton ordered it, evidencing the latent panic of everyone who engaged Norton face to face. It was as though in every exchange of words, in every exchange of glances, he subtly won. He himself had refined his flair to make it a lacerating art, a delicate torture that tightened his interlocutor slowly to subdue him completely. That was how he used to force his opponents in the Pentagon, the CIA, or even the White House to see eye to eye with him. For him, it was just a sport. It was not about having confidential documents on his side to blackmail his opponents. It was about showing them directly that fear had a shape and a face, a blue carnivorous gaze behind dark Ray-Bans. It was about making them feel that fear had blood on its hands, and that it would not miss a beat to wash them away with others' blood, if needed. It was about making them remember that fear would be always monitoring their most intimate movements from a comfortable swivel chair behind a burnished desk, and a spring-coiled will to take them off the world by just lifting a telephone receiver.

That was how he had pulled out the fangs of predators from countless echelons to turn them into his loyal, neutered hounds. However, he recalled no such hurdle to subdue Wallace Boyd. Conversely, he had the impression that the war veteran had let himself be held down from the very beginning, as though he had followed orders instinctively from the time he was recruited for the 101st Airborne Division up to the end of his life. Perhaps that was why Norton made Boyd one of his most trusted men, for he knew the man would never betray him, indulging himself in the calmness of the leash around his neck and the bait of felt his boss made him chase.

Imbued in that void, aqueous space in which his numbed mind found himself, Norton tried to search for a feeling of grief for losing his subordinate, but all he could find was a sober sense of commiseration at his pathetic life, accompanied by a subtle feeling of disgust.

                                             *****

"Yeah...I got him to pull up stakes...OK...well...I'll tell him. Thank you."

Chambers hung up and turned to the cockpit.

"Hey, Fletch."

Fletch removed his aviation headset.

"Yessir?"

"Change of plans. We fly to Fort Meade."

"Yessir."

Chambers went back to his seat, face to face with Clausich, who had remained abstracted to the files of Norton's medical report for the last few days, sorting through the platform of plastic between them both.

"We're changing our course. We're heading to Fort Meade."

"I already heard," answered Clausich without looking away from the report. He wouldn't avert his eyes for the rest of the conversation.

"Norton wants to go back to HQ."

"Go back? Where is he?"

"A secret station under a fake office building in California. He hasn't moved from there since he was brought there."

"And now he suddenly wants to go back?"

Chambers put his hand on the inside of his jacket pocket and introduced his middle finger into a small plastic bag he kept there, pulling out a tiny mound of cocaine on his fingertip and taking it quickly to his nose, as he used to do for dealing with cervical pain. He did not answer until he regained his breath after the brief catatonia.

"There's been an incident with casualties at a police station a few hours ago, and seems Norton's now under a psychotic paranoia and believes he's in danger."

"Someone important must have died for him to take it like that."

"Yeah, it was his oldest subordinate. The name was Boyd."

"Wallace Boyd?"

"Did you know him?"

"Oh, yes." He nodded slowly. "He was pretty old back then. I'm surprised he hadn't already died from stress."

"Well, he had three heart attacks in the last ten years. That's what happens when one's next to Norton all the time."

                                             *****

They landed in Maryland a few hours later. Chambers managed to sneak Clausich through the bureaucratic maze of security prevailing in Fort Meade to reach a broad lift. There, he pulled out what looked like a blue credit card with the logo of the NSA and swiped it through a secret slot on the side of the button panel, then typed the floor buttons in a certain sequence. The elevator went down and remained in descent for two endless minutes until it presented to them a secret floor tinged with bluish-white light, infested by dozens of men in suits who came and went from one door to another. That wasn't a first for Clausich, but he never could get used to the fact that it seemed like a secret society, parallel to life and the rest of the world. Chambers led him to a room he remembered to be the lab, a place full of white-coated people, most of them preparing solutions in test tubes or with eyes stuck in microscopes.

"This is your team. They now only respond to you. We'll bring your bags in a few minutes. Here's everything you need. If something's missing, just say the word.

"I need the rest of the medical report along with the radiographs."

"Norton's auxiliary team has all that. You'll have it when they get back."

"I have enough to get started, anyway."

Chambers adjusted his tie with one hand, the other in the pocket of his suit.

"Well, I'll leave you alone; I have things to do," he said as he walked away, towards the hall. On the verge of crossing the threshold, he turned around one last time. "Remember, ask everything you nee..."

But Clausich was already on the other side of the room, churned between the white fabrics of his new subordinates. For a moment, Chambers had the impression of one who had taken a dolphin back to the sea. Ultimately, the lab was what Clausich needed to recover his sanity after his self-imposed exile.

                                             *****

Chambers returned to the surface and headed to the venue where the covered training gallery was located. He climbed quickly up to the third floor, the last one, and entered the observation box. There, looking diligently through the windows at the inside of the pavilion, was Colonel Ernest Kauffman, a stocky and mature man with brown eyes, military flattop, and stony features, stuffed into his green olive uniform, as always, ornate with colorful medallions on his chest.

"Colonel."

Chambers and the Colonel shook hands as they always had since they'd been assigned to adjacent departments, more by fellowship than by protocol. Despite being good comrades, the rare occasions in which they'd had to work together had failed to germinate into a sturdy friendship, which was the reason Chambers had never dared to ask why the hell the Colonel had agreed to combine his work in the Army with acting as a liaison between it and the NSA. Why should he leave the comfortable chair in his office at the top headquarters of the day to become a glorified errand boy for Norton?

In any case, Chambers knew perfectly why he, himself, had become one of Norton's bloodhounds.

He knew it from the seventeenth day of his tour of duty in Vietnam, thirteen years ago, when at age twenty-four he was sent to contain the attack of North Vietnam during the Easter offensive. Just four hours after departing to the north across the mountain ridge, he witnessed his platoon being ambushed in the middle of the rain forest and being pruned quickly to half its original numbers. The next moment, he found himself throwing his Stoner rifle to the ground and running, backtracking over his own steps, the survivors following him and returning cover fire at the same time.

Before he realized it, just he and one companion were left, both running in terror through vegetation watered by heavy rain as they heard the whistle of bullets whispering at their backs. It was impossible to distinguish with his peripheral vision which branches and plants rustled because of the enemy and which because of the rain. At that point, each movement was an enemy. A bullet flew straight to his pate and tore the helmet off his head, while another shot past his face, opening a blunt cut on his right cheek. He cleaned it quickly with the back of his hand and saw the bloodstain on the sleeve of his olive-green uniform. He noticed that was the first time he'd seen the color red since he landed, highlighting itself mightily above all the new shades of green he had known there.

At that precise moment, he felt something he'd never felt in his life, something atavistic and primary, seeking to cling to the world, to the mud itself. It was then, without warning, he pulled his Mk 22 Mod 0 out of his tactical belt holster and shot his partner in the leg, aware that the man's sacrifice would buy him some time to escape. As soon as he pressed the trigger, the bullet whistles ceased almost instantly, replaced by a string of surprised and agonized cries of rage and horror, so resounding that Chambers thought for a moment he was not moving away from them. But he was. And the cries soon turned off completely. Somewhere between the rain and the trees.

He'd felt no guilt. There had been no time for that.

The encampment guards saw a young, unarmed man with a blank stare coming back, propping his shoulders heavily against whatever tree he found in his path, as though his backbone was made of lead.

He'd spent the next two days under his bed in the fetal position, without saying a word, without eating or complying with any order, just drinking the water that percolated through the fabric of the tent and settled in puddles on the ground. The camp doctor soon assessed him as disabled and gave him permission to return to the United States, but they'd had to move the bed aside and carry him to the first chopper flying out to Fort Shafter, in Hawaii.

Back in Pennsylvania, the psychiatrist diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed a remedy based on pills and a sedentary lifestyle until he returned to balance. PTSD eventually left, but not that new instinct that told him the world was not a place to survive, but to conquer. A place to take revenge on.