“So after all that you decided to join the army.”

“That’s right,” said Patton. “And even though I had a master’s degree, I didn’t opt for officer training. In my family nothing but standard enlistment would suffice.”

“But you’re not in the army anymore,” said Nemo. “You’re not even working in the private sector where you could probably make six figures. You’re hiding out in the hills of North Carolina and you weren’t that surprised someone with a sniper’s rifle found you. You want to tell me what happened?”

“I do not.”

“Friendly fire, perhaps?”

“Why should I tell you anything?” said Patton. “All I know about you is that you’re a professional assassin hired to kill a friend of mine. That hardly qualifies you to know things I haven’t told my own family.”

“ ‘Assassin’ is a harsh word,” said Nemo. “I’ve never taken out a public figure.”

“So you’re just an ordinary murderer,” said Patton.

“I’m a businessman,” said Nemo.

“You’re an emotionless robot from what I can tell,” said Patton. “Now leave me alone so I can work on this crib.”

But Nemo wasn’t emotionless. Emotion, after all, had launched his career; emotion had revealed his peculiar talent. True, he did not dwell on the past, did not dredge up those emotions. He didn’t see the point. But being called an emotionless robot made him want to protest that he had felt emotions more deeply and more horribly than most. At first, watching Patton hunched over, scribbling, he couldn’t understand why he felt this way. Why should he care what she thought? But then he considered how insulated he had been from real human contact for so many years. He had run a lot, and hidden a lot, but he had never done either with a companion, always alone. Patton seemed to waken some latent humanity in him, and he wasn’t sure he liked that. He reclined his seat, leaned back, closed his eyes, and allowed himself, carefully, to return to that night it had all begun—the last time he had cared about anyone other than himself. He indulged in this exercise occasionally—the controlled reliving of those events. He reasoned that if he remembered them on purpose, with his emotional guard up, it might prevent their rearing up unbidden at some inconvenient moment, might prevent flashbacks and nightmares and cold sweat at three in the morning. Sometimes it worked. Usually it didn’t.