“Did you kill him?”

“Nah. I was too busy holding my guts inside me.” His eyes had turned dark for a moment, but his hand never missed a stroke. “I was in the hospital for like eight goddamned months and that goddamned Senator Hartmann whose life I’d just saved never even sent me a get-well card. But he got his, eventually.”

“Don’t blaspheme,” the Angel had moaned, and suddenly concerned with other matters, Ray never told her exactly what it was the senator had gotten. Later she’d looked him up in the SCARE archives and what he had gotten had been pretty bad indeed.

Back in the present, she smiled down at him. She had her own scars, some visible, some not, but the worst of her visible ones was the one that crawled over her flat stomach like a snake. Ray had never asked her about it.

The Angel suddenly realized that Ray’s left eye was open and squinting up at her.

“How’d you know that I was awake?” she asked him.

“You’re breathing harder,” Ray told her.

Her smile broadened. “We have a busy day ahead of us.”

“Just another day of saving the world.”

“Do we have time, do you think…”

He grabbed her, pulled her on top of him.

“I’ll always have time for you, baby.”

This was, the Angel thought, her most favorite part of the day.

Barbara shook her head, scanning the pages before her. Under her feet, the floor of the UN jet throbbed, and the faint roaring of the jets penetrated even the soundproofed meeting room where she, Klaus, and Jayewardene sat, with stacks of flimsy printouts in front of them. The rest of the Committee aces were ensconced in the main passenger cabin, or perhaps mingling with the press crew at the rear of the plane. The Secretary-General was poring over his stack; Lohengrin had barely glanced at his. Barbara thumbed through hers quickly, looking for the ones that Ink, Barbara’s assistant, had marked at the top with an asterisk.

Too many requests for intervention. It wears on all of us, and especially Klaus. Barbara knew that Klaus was feeling overwhelmed by the red tape, the bureaucracy, the rules and regulations that were slowly strangling the Committee as it become more firmly enmeshed in the UN’s structure.

The stack of reports had a bewildering array of global issues: the continuing eruptions of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which were disrupting air travel throughout Europe (no asterisk on that one); Barbara wondered what in the hell anyone thought the UN or the Committee aces could do about a volcanic eruption, or if they’d act even if they could; fighting in Dili, the capital of East Timor, between jokers and the police over promised health care reforms (an asterisk from Ink on this one, with the terse note Could become an issue); riots in Talas (that one prominently asterisked with the note Got more on this at the office); more Somalia piracy, but no asterisk; Kim Jong-un’s threats to test a wild card bomb in order to create aces for North Korea, which had never had a significant outbreak of the virus (that one asterisked, with a note underneath stating Still no reports of the DPRK having the virus, or labs capable of growing large quantities of it).