“I mean that I go on a lot of first dates. Online dating, you know. I go on dates and eventually we talk about what we do for a living. And then I get a lot of questions about what I do. About killing people.”

“And what do you tell them?”

“I don’t tell them, I do this.” I reached into a pocket and pulled out three small objects and held them out for Langdon to look at.

She did. “All right, I give up. What are those?”

“They’re ten-sided dice.” I set them down in front of her.

“You actually walk around with three ten-sided dice in your pocket.”

“I do. A lot of us do. Because we answer this question a lot. Pick them up, please.”

She did. “All right, what now?”

“Here’s the deal. You’re someone who needs a dispatcher. The dispatcher is going to shoot you in the head. If you roll three zeros, you’re dead. If you roll anything else, then after you’ve been shot in the head, five seconds later you rematerialize at home, probably on your bed. You’re naked but otherwise you’re perfectly fine.” I pointed to the hand she held the dice in. “Now roll.”

She rolled. “Six two one.”

“You live. Roll again.”

“Two nine nine.”

“You live. Roll again.”

“Six five three.”

“You live. Roll again.”

“I actually do understand statistics, Mr. Valdez.”

“Then you get my point. When a dispatcher does his or her job, the odds of them killing someone are actually pretty low.”

Langdon reached out to return my dice to me. “You’re saying about one chance in a thousand.”

I took them and pocketed them. “That’s what the Agency says.”

“What about your own experience?”

“I’ve been doing this for eight years. I’ve dispatched more than a thousand people. Probably closer to fourteen or fifteen hundred. They’ve all ended up at home, mostly in bed, naked.”

“But there’s always a chance someone will stay dead.”

“Yes, there is. And that’s why dispatchers exist. Licensed, bonded, insured and we’ve passed a bunch of psychological tests that indicate we can handle the aftermath of a failed dispatch.”

“Do you believe that? That you’re psychologically equipped to handle the fact that you’ve killed someone? I mean, that they’re actually dead because of you.”

Another bus rolled in; I took a sip of my coffee until it drove away. “You know about the first time anyone ever came back?” I said, to Langdon.

“Not really.”