The dead homeless man must have been there for days, undiscovered. He looked both bloated, a tattered red cotton shirt stretched taut across his enormous belly, and shrunken, as if something essential had been sucked out of him. The exposed parts of him had been nibbled by animals, there were bugs on his milky-white eyes, and when the wind came around the smell was so bad that Brian's friend Kev turned and promptly vomited into the glassy water of the creek.

The three of them ran back to the friendly part of the park and told Pastor Carlysle what they'd found, and that was the end of the picnic.

The police were called, an ambulance came to retrieve the body, and the suddenly somber gathering broke up.

Kev and Lyle, over the course of the next six months, stopped showing up for Sunday services, as if the church and dead man had become associated one with the other, but Brian had the opposite reaction. He believed in the protective power of the chapel, precisely because he had seen what lay beyond it. He had seen unhallowed death.

He had seen death, and death shouldn't have surprised him: nevertheless he was shocked by what popped out of his mailbox twenty years later, within the sanctified walls of his office and the carefully-defined if crumbling boundaries of his adult life.

* * * * *

Two days before he had received the brief, aborted phone call from Lise.

It had come late in the late evening. Brian had been on his way home from one of those tedious consulate social nights, drinks at the ambassadors residence and small talk with the usual suspects. Brian didn't drink much but what he did drink went to his head, and he let his car do the driving on the way home.

Slowly, then—the car was idiotically literal-minded about speed limits and restricted to the few streets with automated driving grids—but safely, he came back to the apartment he had once shared with Lise, with its attendant atmosphere of claustrophobia and something that might have been desperation had it been less comfortably furnished. He showered before bed, and as he toweled off he listened to the silence of the city night and thought: am I inside the circle or out of it?

The phone rang as he turned out the lights. He put the slate wedge to his ear and registered her distant voice.

He tried to warn her. She said things he didn't immediately understand.

And then the connection was broken.

* * * * *

Probably he should have gone to Sigmund and Weil with this, but he didn't. Couldn't. The message was personal. It was meant for him and for him alone. Sigmund and Weil could get along without it. Early the next day he sat in his office thinking about Lise, his failed marriage. Then he picked up the phone and called Pieter Kirchberg, his contact at the Security and Law Enforcement Division of the UN Provisional Government.