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As he’d suspected, it was Esme again.
Esme, ten years older.
She’d been a beautiful child. It should be no surprise that she was a beautiful young woman.
She looked around the room anxiously. Her gaze passed right over Griffin. Evidently, she had forgotten him years ago. But when she saw Leyster, her face lit up and she headed straight toward him.
The band began to play. People began to dance. Griffin watched from the far side of the room as Esme explained to Leyster who she was.
She wore a shark’s tooth around her neck on a silken cord.
“Who’s the chippie talking to Leyster?”
Griffin turned. It was Salley. She was smiling in a way he couldn’t read. “It’s a sad story.”
“Then tell me it on the dance floor.”
She took his hand and led him away.
A slow dance is a slow dance the world around. Briefly, Griffin was able to forget himself. Then Salley said, “Well?”
He explained about the girl. “It really is a pity. Esme was so full of curiosity and enthusiasm when she was a child. She’d make a great biologist. But it was her misfortune to be born wealthy. She had dreams. But her parents had too much money to allow that!”
“She could’ve broken away,” Salley said dismissively. “Hell, she still could. She’s young.”
“She won’t.”
“How do you know?”
Griffin knew because he’d glanced through the perso
“Why’s she back here?”
“I suppose she’s reliving her moment of glory. The last time she seriously thought she might make a life for herself.”
Salley watched how the girl put her arms around Leyster’s neck, how she stared deeply into his eyes. Leyster looked spooked. He was definitely out of his depth. “She’s just a headhunter.”
“She doesn’t get to be what she wanted. Why not let her have her consolation prize?”
“So she gets her trophy fuck?” Salley said scornfully. “Much good it will do either of them. He looks ashamed of himself already.”
“Well, things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to.”
They danced for a time. Salley put her head on Griffin’s shoulder, and said, “How’d she get back here in the first place?”
“We don’t publicize it, but occasionally, we’ll make that kind of arrangement. For a considerable fee. Under carefully controlled circumstances.”
“Tell me something, Griffin. How did I get that Allosaurus hatchling past all your security people?”
“You were lucky. It won’t happen again.”
She drew back and looked at him coldly. “Don’t give me that. I waltzed right through. People turned their backs. Halls were empty. Everything fell into place. How?”
He smiled. “Well… thwarted, as I so often am, by bureaucracy, I came to feel that all this secrecy was… an u
“You shithead.” She pressed her body against his. They couldn’t have been any closer if they tried. “Why make me jump through hoops? Why make everything so convoluted and baroque?”
He shrugged. “Welcome to my world.”
“They say that once in her life, every woman should fall in love with a real bastard.” She looked deeply in his eyes. “I wonder if you’re mine.”
He drew back from her a little. “You’re drunk.”
“Lucky you,” she murmured. “Lucky, lucky you.”
Hours later, personal time, Griffin returned to his office. The lights were on. Other than himself, there was only one person he trusted with the key. “Jimmy,” he said as he opened the door, “I swear my body aches in places I never—”
His chair swivelled around.
“We need to talk,” the Old Man said.
Griffin stopped. Then he shut the door behind him. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a shot of 90-proof Bulleit. The Old Man, he noted, had been there before him. “So talk.”
The Old Man lifted the top report from the stack and read: “ ‘Defector said priority was given to opportunities to assassinate high-profile individuals, to which end a short list had been made of opportunities. Primary among these were fundraisers.’ ”
He dropped the report on the desk. “Had you bothered to read this, you’d know that Holy Redeemer’s hit list of people they particularly want to take out has our two favorite media hounds, Salley and Leyster, in positions one and two. You should not have been taken by surprise today. You should have known to keep those two apart.”
“So? Jimmy caught the terrorists. You notified him to do so. The system worked as well as it ever does. Meanwhile, I get to keep my options open.”
The Old Man stood, steadying himself with one hand on the desktop. Griffin had to wonder how much he’d had to drink already. “We caught two fucking outside operatives, and we’ve still got a mole in our operation. How did they know about the Ball? Who told them which caterer would be handling it?” He slammed the pile of reports with his fist. “You have no options. Read these. All. Now.”
Griffin took his seat.
Griffin was a fast reader. Still, it took him over an hour to absorb everything. When he was done, he covered his eyes with his hands. “You want me to use Leyster and Salley as bait.”
“Yes.”
“Knowing what will happen to them.”
“Yes.”
“You’re prepared to let people die.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a god-damned filthy thing to do.”
“From my perspective, it was a god-damned filthy thing to do. You’ll do it, though. I’m sure of that much.”
Griffin stared long and hard into the Old Man’s eyes.
Those eyes fascinated and repulsed Griffin. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime’s accumulation of wrinkles. He’d been working with the Old Man since he was first recruited for the project, and they were still a mystery to him, absolutely opaque. They made him feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.
He hadn’t touched his bourbon yet. But when he reached for it, the Old Man took the glass and poured it back into the decanter. He capped it and put it back in the cabinet. “You don’t need that stuff.”
“You’ve been drinking it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a lot older than you are.”
Griffin wasn’t sure how old the Old Man was. There were longevity treatments available for those who played the game, and the Old Man had been playing this lousy game so long he practically ran it. All Griffin knew for sure was that he and the Old Man were one and the same person.
Overcome with loathing, Griffin said, “You know, I could slit my wrists tonight, and then where would you be?”
That hit home. For a long moment the Old Man did not speak. Possibly he was thinking of the consequences of such a major paradox. It would bring their sponsors down on them like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively. Everything co
He didn’t know that he’d regret that.
“Listen,” the Old Man said at last. “You remember that day in the Peabody?”
“You know I do.”
“I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart—all your heart—that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. That some things could never be.”
Griffin said nothing.
“God hands you a miracle,” the Old Man said, “you don’t throw it back in his face.”
Then he left.