“Five minutes,” he says.

I go down the street to a copier place like a business center and I use the computer there to do some very small mostly unimportant things to the file stored on the memory stick and then I take the little half a cow back to the tobacco shop and the little guy puts it back behind the counter.

Sometimes you don’t have to pay a man or threaten him or anything at all he is just right there in life’s window waiting for you to come and stand underneath, and when you know that, he can see that you know it, and then you are together in a kind of conspiracy forever that is deeper than friendship because it is about souls.

And usually it is what happens when a bad person or someone who is just flat out an asshole relies on the best person he knows to do something secret and important for him and little by little that good person who is his friend gets a sense of who he is friends with and then one day very quietly after a long long time, all he wants to do is punch that fucker in the head until you can see bone because good people are not weak people or even necessarily nice people they are just slower to get to where the rest of us are all the damn time and that is as good as souls get in this world.

I do not believe in those but even so I know this is true.

I know because Caporal-Chef Aaron—after all this time and coffee and not talking—just gave me Eiger’s fail-safe code key and he knows that means Eiger is likely going to die. This is Eiger’s super-secret system for designating an alternate if he is compromised. His death beeper in his watch or his pacemaker or whatever the shit it is sends a message to this little guy and the guy walks the memory stick to a lawyer’s office and they put it into the system and authorize the new person and then and only then does anyone outside of Eiger and the little guy know who that is.

And this is the moment at which I kind of could just shut this all down because from now on the only thing between me and Eiger’s bank is Eiger’s heartbeat and if Volodya was here—

Well. He’s not.

They say that in the end everyone dies alone but in pure mathematical terms I am bound to say I doubt that will be true in this case.

—

I go back to the pig farm and tell Charlie that Bruno is dead.

Charlie says “Oh.”