“Plough,” Anshaw said. “He had helicopters doing flyovers of my house. They’d fly over once or twice a day. They used different kinds of helicopters on different days to try and keep me from putting two and two together. But I knew what they were up to. I started watching them from the kitchen with my field glasses, and one day I saw Plough at the controls of a radio-station traffic copter. I didn’t even know he knew how to pilot a bird until then. He was wearing a black helmet and sunglasses, but I still recognized him.”

As Anshaw spoke, Mal remembered Corporal Plough trying to open a bottle of Red Stripe with the blade of his bayonet and the knife slipping, catching him across the thumb, Plough sucking on it and saying around his thumb, Motherfuck, someone open this for me.

“No, Anshaw. It wasn’t him. It was just someone who looked like him. If he could fly a helicopter, they would’ve had him piloting Apaches over there.”

“Plough admitted it. Not at first. At first he lied. But eventually he told me everything, that he was in the helicopter, that they’d been keeping me under surveillance ever since I came home.” Anshaw moved the tip of the shears to point at another thumb, shriveled and brown, with the texture and appearance of a dried mushroom. “This was his wife. She admitted it, too. They were putting dope in my water to make me sluggish and stupid. Sometimes I’d be driving home and I’d forget what my own house looked like. I’d spend twenty minutes cruising around my development before I realized I’d gone by my place twice.”

He paused, moved the tip of the shears to a fresher thumb, a woman’s, the nail painted red. “She followed me into a supermarket in Poughkeepsie. This was while I was on my way north, to see you. To see if you had been compromised. This woman in the supermarket, she followed me aisle to aisle, always whispering on her cell phone. Pretending not to look at me. Then, later, I went into a Chinese place and noticed her parked across the street, still on the phone. She was the toughest to get solid information out of. I almost thought I was wrong about her. She told me she was a first-grade teacher. She told me she didn’t even know my name and that she wasn’t following me. I almost believed her. She had a photo in her purse, of her sitting on the grass with a bunch of little kids. But it was tricked up. They used Photoshop to stick her in that picture. I even got her to admit it in the end.”