At the sound of her voice I tremble with love and hatred. I perform an allover body spasm like a horse dispersing flies. I make a sprintlike move toward her but then I jerk to a hard stop as if reaching the end of an invisible leash.

No, I tell myself. Quit it. That’s not what I’m here for.

“Hey,” I say, trying so hard to sound uninjured that I sound ludicrous. It couldn’t be any stupider if I had appended “What’s up?”

“Your leg!” she cries. “You’re O.K.! Oh, God, I was so—” but the rest of the sentence is drowned in tears and choking.

“Forget it,” I say coolly. “There isn’t time. I’m here to get you out. That’s all.”

She flinches—she took a bullet with less expression of pain—and although I ache with regret, I force myself to be hard, indurate, unreadable. I don’t give anything back. Not one thing. Wordlessly, I start cutting Charlie out of the duct tape, trying hard not to touch her or smell her or look too directly at her skin. If I’m going to go through with this, if I’m going to hit the button and fork her over to Nunes and imprisonment, I need to keep my senses out of it.

When I cut her good arm free she wraps it around my neck and rains kisses on me and nuzzles my neck like her life depends on it. Right now, it does. But mine depends on resolve, so I shrug out of her embrace, pushing her beautiful, bruised mouth away from my neck, her fragrant hair—full of the joy of our history, full of the impossible longing for our future—out of my face.

“Otto—”

Whatever lie she had coming doesn’t make it to the airwaves. It is interrupted by the sound of the door sliding open behind us and, shortly thereafter, the staccato chorus of clicks that signifies the rapid cocking of many guns.

Baconmouth

Baconmouth

Like everyone else in my universe, Azar is bigger than me, but only in the belt line. He has a squat, slovenly, bullfrog build. In the notch of this flabby throat he has a nickel-sized hole, a tracheostomy. Pushing out of a sleeve is a chronograph the size of a biscuit. It looks like it could tell you the time, the moon phase, the weather in Tokyo, and precisely how much money you don’t have in your checking account. It’s a fuck-you watch, attached to the fat wrist that’s attached to the kill-you hand.

So this is the magus who sends agents into my life to ruin me. To make me love them. And now here I am. Saliva bubbles in the corners of his mouth. He can barely wait.