Nate tried to move Anatoli to the car, unsuccessfully. He kept trying before figuring out that the old man’s ankles were bound.

The philosophy-slash-physics student was not very proficient at this, Denton surmised. Nate’s movements were nervous and unwise. He should have moved Anatoli farther from Mr. Smith before doing anything more, picking him up and carrying him if necessary. Instead, Nate seemed fixated on getting Anatoli to walk. He crouched down, trying to undo the binding at Anatoli’s feet.

“Nate!” Denton called in warning.

Too late. Mr. Smith’s foot came out, kicking Nate squarely in the chin with furious force. Denton let off a shot, a shot that came not from panic but from anger. It might even have hit Mr. Smith, except that the man tucked and rolled, disappearing around the front of the car.

The situation, at that instant, was very bad. Nate was sprawled on his back on the ground, out cold. Anatoli was standing bound, black sack at his feet, his mouth open and screeching. And Mr. Smith was out of sight on the other side of the car, no doubt with a gun. They hadn’t disarmed him. That had been a mistake.

Denton chuckled.

He felt a bizarre sense of ease. It was as if he could see all of the possibilities laid out before him, stretching away from this moment like shining cords of light. He might overcome Mr. Smith, and if he did one band of light would brighten, the rest flickering out, and life would proceed in a certain direction. And if he did not, another path would quicken and spread. He might, within minutes, be lying dead on the ground. Or… not. Life, unstoppable, immutable life, would go on either way. It was not concerned with how the pattern turned out any more than it had to deliberate on the design of an individual snowflake.

Denton, however, wanted very much to win.

He did not hear so much as sense Smith approaching, crouching around the right side of the car. Denton shifted, down and to his left, moving around from the trunk to the left side of the car. He was alert, calm but electrified as a live wire. He thought quickly. He could continue to circle the car, risking his life on his power of stealth, hoping that he might be able to sneak up behind Smith even as Smith was trying to sneak up on him.

Or he could do as he was doing now—slip off his shoes and climb up onto the hood.

It was crazy. From his position on top of the car he would be vulnerable. If his feet made a noise, if the metal of the car gave a little, making a tinny denting sound, Smith would know where he was and Denton would be an open, visible target. But if not…

Luck was with him. He seemed light as a feather as he mounted the hood. The car took his weight without a sound. As he bellied onto the roof, he got a clear view of Mr. Smith. The man who had beaten him in LA so coldly was crouched near the trunk, gun raised high in his hand, his attention focused as he peered, cautiously, around the end of the car.

Denton’s breath misted in front of his eyes, causing the image of the Mossad agent to take on a foggy quality. He aimed his gun.

In a Western, shooting a man in the back was dishonorable. Denton, however, knew he was by far the underdog in this match and had to take his shots where he found them. He also knew he didn’t have the skill to wound the man or, like they did in movies, dislodge the gun from his hand with a single shot, leaving him with burning fingers but no permanent damage.

No. That was not real life. The reality was that he was incompetent with a gun and probably should have been dead already. Denton aimed as best he could at the center of Smith’s back and fired.

When they landed in Washington, Dr. Talcott was quiet. She had talked herself out, whispering mysteries in his ear like some Lilith for the past several hours. And he had not acknowledged any of them.

As they got off the plane, she looked discouraged and tired. Farris kept tight hold of her arm, pulling her through the terminal and outside. He got them a taxi to his apartment. He’d remembered many things by now, and he was able to give the address to the taxi driver. He even sounded normal when he said it.

When they got there, when they were standing right outside his door, he suddenly couldn’t bear to have her see this. He didn’t know how he was going to react to what was inside, but he had to do it alone. He thought about tying her up or stashing her somewhere, but he just… the truth was, he didn’t want to fuck with it. He told her to wait down the hall.

He had to break in, having lost his keys long ago. Inside, he did a quick reconnaissance, but the place was empty. He closed the blinds, locked the door, shoved a chair against it, and turned on the light. He spent a while searching the place for bugs and cameras, but it was halfhearted, satisfying a vague paranoia.

There were no bugs. The doors and windows locked tight. For a moment he marveled at the privacy these things implied. In here as in the streets and airports, Calder Farris was invisible.

The apartment was chilly, sparsely furnished. It was familiar but seemed detached from himself. It stirred nothing inside him.

At length, a box attracted his attention. It was white cardboard and he knew it held the past. He opened it and found pictures—mostly colored, some black-and-white. They were images of Calder Farris, of childhood, his father, high school, a few from Desert Storm and other military experiences. There were not many of them, considering the span of such a life. Farris had not liked being photographed. He stood alone in almost all of them and he always looked the same, staring at the camera with glasses disguising his eyes.

In a muddy, unruly flood, the whole of his previous life came back to him, washing away the bits and pieces of recollection and becoming a solid knowing. He saw it all, not objectively—he was far from objective—but with the rawness of someone who’d had tremendous hope for a thing… and was terribly disappointed.

All the way here from Poland he had hoped and had not even known he was hoping—for something warm in this life, for something he could not even define. Maybe he had hoped that for Calder Farris there would be… what? A woman, a mate, friends at least—some shelter, some meaning, some bright end to all the pain, a haven, a home. And there was nothing.

Dr. Talcott had tried to explain to him about the gateway and how it chose where they went. He had pretended not to believe. But he’d always known that somehow, in Centalia, he had entered the darkest part of his own mind, that Centalia was a nightmare only he could dream. And maybe that had been part of the madness.

This empty apartment was Calder Farris also. His life had been dedicated to his job and only that, to the government, the United States military. He had believed in it with an angry, brutal faith.

The state rewards service. Long live the state.

“It was a false alarm, sir.”

Calder Farris sat at a conference table across from Gen. Franklin Deall. Also in the meeting was Dr. Alan Rickman, the director of the DSO. The two of them were looking at him with incredulity and anger.

“A false alarm?” General Deall managed to berate him with that single phrase. “You call an XL3, spend a fortune in Seattle, drag a team of men to Poland to chase down this Dr. Talcott, then disappear from all contact for nine days, and now you say it was a false alarm? You’d better explain yourself, Lieutenant. And I mean now.”

Dr. Rickman was allowing General Deall to run the show, but he was watching with tight-lipped enjoyment. Farris recalled that Rickman had always been a little afraid of him. Rickman had never liked the seedier part of weapon procurement.