Now, Monday morning, he turned from the river and stretched. He was more or less functioning, after a grand total of four hours’ sleep (very bad; fatigue gives the Smoke strength) and a shower in the NIOS gym. In his twenty-by-twenty office, bare except for safes, cabinets, computers, a few pictures, books and maps, Metzger sipped his latte. He’d bought his personal assistant the same—Ruth’s had been assembled with soy milk. He wondered if he should try that. She claimed the substance was a relaxer.

He regarded the framed picture of himself and his children on a vacation in Boone, North Carolina. He recalled the horseback ride at the tourist stable. Afterward an employee had taken this souvenir snap of the three of them. Metzger had noted that the camera the cowboy-clad employee had used was a Nikon, the same company that made the scopes his snipers used in Iraq. Thinking specifically of one of his men firing a Lapua .338 round 1,860 yards into the shoulder of an Iraqi about to detonate an IED. It’s not like the movies; a round like that will kill you pretty much anywhere it strikes. Shoulder, leg, anywhere. That insurgent had simply come apart and fallen to the sand, as Shreve Metzger exhaled with warm peace and joy.

Smile, Mr. Metzger. You have wonderful children. Do you want three eight-by-tens and a dozen wallet pictures?

There was no Smoke inside him when he was planning and executing the death of a traitor. None at all. He’d told that to Dr. Fischer. The psychiatrist had seemed uneasy and they didn’t explore that theme further.

Metzger glanced at his computer and at his magic phone.

His pale eyes—a hazel color he didn’t care for, yellowish green, sickly—looked out his window again at the slice of Hudson River, the view courtesy of a handful of psychotic fools, who, one clear September day, had removed the buildings that interfered with that vista. And who had inadvertently, to their surviving compatriots’ loss, driven Metzger into his new profession.

With these thoughts, the Smoke coalesced, as it often did when 9/11 came to mind. The memories of that day used to be debilitating. Now they simply stabbed with searing pain.

Let it go…

His phone rang. He regarded caller ID, which reported, in translation, You’re fucked.

“Metzger here.”

“Shreve!” the caller blurted cheerfully. “How are you? Been a month of Sundays since we chatted.”

Metzger had disliked the Wizard of Oz. That is, the wizard himself, as a character (he rather enjoyed the movie). He was furtive and manipulative and arbitrary and had ascended to the throne by false pretense…and yet he commanded all the power in the land.

Much like the caller he was now speaking to.

His own personal Wizard was chiding, “You didn’t call me, Shreve.”