A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0044

Chapter 44

Nobody stopped them.

That was the first thing Jack registered as he crossed the threshold of San Diego City Hall, and the thing that bothered him the most. He had spent his entire life learning how to enter places where he wasn’t welcome, and his body retained that learning like any other, in his shoulders, in the angle of his chin, in the way he measured a door before crossing it. Now he was climbing the marble staircase of a public building on a Monday morning, passing the security guard in the lobby, going through a deactivated metal detector, and the most he received in return was a nod. The guard knew who they were. Someone had warned them. Someone had run the order down the building’s hierarchy like someone lowering a bucket on a rope, and the bucket had reached the doorman with the simple message to let through the two who came asking for the mayor.

That was it, Jack concluded, what public money could buy when it wanted to. Not security. Fluidity.

“I thought it was going to be harder,” Kevin said quietly beside him, his eyes darting across the high ceiling of the hallway. “Like, I don’t know. A magazine. A name tag. Something.”

“It would be different if they didn’t want us here.” Jack kept walking. “Public buildings work the opposite way from the rest of the world. For those they don’t want, there’s a lawsuit. For those they do want, there’s a corridor.”

The corridor in question deserved to be looked at, and Jack looked at it the way he had learned to look at everything in recent months, in layers. The first layer was what anyone would see: old marble worn in the center by a century of foot traffic, a ceiling too high for the heating to cope, portraits of dead men in gilded frames accompanying the walk of those passing by. A building constructed in an era when the government insisted on appearing eternal. The second layer was what the suit revealed, and this no one else on Earth was seeing. Behind the dark, gold-framed lenses, thin lines of light were drawn over the real world like a decal: the floor plan of the entire building, floor by floor, the supporting columns highlighted in thicker lines, the service staircase behind the east wall, the ventilation duct wide enough for a thin man, the three exits not indicated on the emergency signage. The suit read the building the way an agent would, cataloging escape routes Jack didn’t intend to use, and he let the information seep into the back of his mind because he’d discovered it was easier to live with it than to shut it off. Knowing where the exits were had become, for him, what breathing is for everyone else.

The third layer was the saddest, and it didn’t need any lenses.

Half the rooms were dark. He counted them involuntarily, door by door, the dark, frosted glass, the doorknobs without recent fingerprints on the thin film of dust that his suit insisted on highlighting. Empty desks glimpsed through half-open doors, a water cooler with an empty jug, a bulletin board where the most recent announcement was dated four months ago. The newspaper spoke of the ailing city every day, and Jack had seen the illness up close in the streets, in the dark neighborhoods, in the faces. What he hadn’t yet seen was this: the illness inside the very organism that should be fighting it. A city hall is the immune system of a city, and this one was walking its own corridors with a fever.

The few employees who crossed paths with them did what people do when faced with an unexpectedly well-dressed person. They made way for them.

And there was a reason to open.

Jack knew this with an objectivity devoid of any vanity, just as he knew the weight of the weapons he wasn’t carrying tonight. The previous night, between one clause and another of the contract, he had stood in the middle of the warehouse and asked the suit for something he had never asked for before: elegance. The fabric had responded as it always did, without question and without noise, the operational black flowing and rearranging itself over his body until it settled into a suit of a cut Jack only knew from shop windows, and expensive shop windows at that, the kind that don’t even have price tags because whoever needs to ask won’t buy it.

Dark graphite, narrow lapel, a cut that followed the chest that the last few months had broadened and the arms that training had reshaped. A nobody shouldn’t own a piece like that. There was no honest connection between the life Jack had lived and the fabric he wore, and he counted on that very thing: clothes, he had learned early on, are the lie that people read first and question last. Anyone looking at him in that hallway would see old money, contacts, a surname. No one would see the warehouse, the mattress on the mezzanine, the ninety thousand dollars of debt sitting on the horizon.

Kevin, standing next to him, was wearing a real suit.

It was navy blue, fine wool, custom-made two years earlier for a Kevin who existed in his father’s plans but had never actually appeared in a suit—the presentable heir who would attend dinners and shake the right hands. The wool had cost more than a year’s rent for Jack’s old room, and yet, juxtaposed with what the suit had produced overnight, it looked like graduation attire. Kevin had picked it up from his parents’ house late Sunday afternoon, an operation he himself described, upon returning, as the most dangerous thing he had ever done, which, coming from a man who had held a monster’s tongue with his bare hands, said something. He had entered through the kitchen door, climbed the stairs in his socks, taken the suit from the closet, and left in eleven minutes, unseen, and spent the rest of the night with the expression of someone who knows he has only postponed the execution.

“Stop tugging at your fist,” Jack said, without turning his head.

“My fist is strangling me.”

“The fist is on your wrist.”

“It’s an emotional chokehold.” Kevin twisted his neck inside the collar. “The last time I wore this, my dad spent the entire dinner talking about profit margins. I’m having muscle memory.”

Jack almost smiled. The truth, which he wasn’t going to say there in the hallway, was that Kevin’s body memory had been worth the entire contract. They had spent Sunday night hunched over the desk in the warehouse office, hastily drafting the document that was now in the leather briefcase under Jack’s arm, and the division of labor had unfolded on its own, as natural as everything else between them. Jack provided the paranoia: confidentiality clause about identities, strict definition of who within the public structure would have access to what, termination conditions, the requirement that no image or record of them circulate without approval. Kevin provided the language.

The prodigal son of the wealthy family might have skipped all the business dinners his mother organized, but he had grown up within them, and the vocabulary of contracts was ingrained in him the way the smell of frying oil permeates someone who grows up above a diner. It was Kevin who knew that “monthly remuneration” sounded better than “payment,” that adjustment deadlines are written before you need them, that a contract without a jurisdiction clause is an invitation. Jack had spent a good part of the night in silence, watching his friend cross out and rewrite, and thinking that Kevin’s father, who would soon want to kill him, had unknowingly trained his son for that night his whole life.

The result now lay dormant in the folder: two copies, printed on the agonizing printer they had bought secondhand, asking the city of San Diego for one million dollars a month, access to police resources and information, and city hall support in acquiring equipment for the base. Twelve million a year. Drafted between midnight and four in the morning by two men in their forties combined with zero experience in selling protection to a public entity.

Jack had no idea whether it was too much or too little. And this ignorance, specific and incorrigible at this point, had been a thorn in his side ever since they left the shed.

The office reception area was the only room on the floor that still feigned activity. A young woman occupied the desk by the double doors, seated in front of a computer that made Jack slow down half a step, not because of the woman, but because of the machine. It was a beige block from another decade, the bulging monitor occupying a third of the desk, the internal fan spinning with the constant buzzing of a tired insect. He should have gotten used to it, but he hadn’t. This world refused to settle its own accounts: it had the internet spreading to homes, it had a social network where half the city poured out its life, and at the same time the telephones were bricks of keys, the computers were mobile, and an entire city hall ran on paper. A society that had run in some directions and forgotten to run in others, as if all the available ingenuity had been spent elsewhere. Jack had a theory about which place, and the theory wore a golden logo, and he kept it where he kept everything else.

There was, perhaps, a niche there to be explored. A social network, a city hungry for new faces. He filed the idea away along with the others he didn’t have time to pursue.

“Good morning,” said Jack, stopping in front of the table. “We have a meeting with the mayor.”

The girl looked up from the screen.

And it froze.

Jack watched it unfold in real time, with the slightly awkward clarity that his glasses provided: her pupils dilating, the color rising up her neck and spreading across her cheeks in two distinct patches, her lips parting without making a sound. He knew that reaction. It had been happening with increasing frequency in recent months, as whatever was happening inside him finished happening outside, and he still hadn’t quite decided how to feel about it. The face reflected back in the mirror was no longer the thin, sunken face with dark circles under his eyes that had arrived in San Diego. His skin had tightened into a smoothness that didn’t belong to the life he led, his blond hair had gained a shine he didn’t cultivate, his green eyes had become greener, or perhaps the rest of his face had learned to frame them. Added to his new physique and the suit that fell on him as if he had been born there—because technically he had—the effect on strangers was this: ten seconds of system downtime.

He decided, as he had been deciding, to treat it like he treated the building’s blueprint behind the lenses. Just another instrument. Instruments don’t ask for opinions.

“Excuse me,” he said, letting a small smile creep into his voice. “We have an appointment with the mayor.”

The young woman blinked, snapped back to reality with a slight start, and dove into the screen as if diving for a buoy. “Um… um moment, sir.” Her fingers ran across the keyboard. There was indeed a meeting scheduled for that time, Jack saw the reflection on the bulky monitor, a blank space marked in the agenda, and also saw the young woman frown at the gap, hesitate, and choose the phone. She dialed by heart, three internal digits, the automatic gesture of someone who does this dozens of times a day.

“Mr. Mayor? There are two people here for you. They say they have a meeting scheduled.” A pause. Her eyes rose to Jack above the monitor and then quickly fell back down, like fingers on a hot plate. “Yes. Yes, sir.” She placed the phone back on the hook with unnecessary care. “You can go in. He’s waiting.”

“Thank you, miss.” Jack nodded slightly. “Have a good day.”

Her blush, which had begun to fade, rose again to her ears. Kevin waited until they were three steps from the double doors before murmuring, without moving his lips:

“That was cruel.”

“That was education.”

“From where I was standing, it was artillery fire.”

Jack pushed the door open.

The office greeted them with the smell of old smoke and paper, and with the best view Jack had ever seen of San Diego. The wide window at the back offered a panoramic view of the entire city all the way to the harbor, the flat, luminous morning water, the downtown towers silhouetted against it, and from up there, framed and distant, San Diego seemed like a city with its finances in order. It was a lie of altitude. Jack knew by heart what those beautiful blocks concealed when you descended to them, and he suspected immediately that the man behind the desk knew even better, and that living with that view hanging over his head, beautiful and false, eight hours a day, was a particular form of punishment.

The man behind the desk matched the building: excellence had prevailed beneath the wear and tear. His hair was completely white, and his beard had grown alongside it, white and untrimmed, framing a face that bore the specific ruin of someone who hadn’t slept a full night in weeks. Reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, a lit cigar resting between the fingers of his left hand, and before him the large, old desk almost buried, piles of folders overflowing from all sides onto the few centimeters of wood that the mayor kept free in front of him through the visible strain of his forearms. The gray computer in the corner hummed louder than the one in the reception area. As they entered, the old man still divided his attention between an open document and the screen, typing something with two fingers, finishing the sentence before admitting the interruption, and there was a message in that that Jack registered and respected: in this office, the work doesn’t stop for anyone.

Then the mayor looked up above his glasses, and his tired face broke into a smile.

“Well, look at that.” He leaned back, and the old chair creaked softly. The ember from the cigar arced toward them, pointing them out like someone delivering good news. “Our newest heroes. Sit down, sit down.”

The two chairs in front of the table were made of worn, comfortable leather, relics from the same era as the building. Jack sat down, took off his sunglasses and folded them into the inside pocket, and the building’s blueprint faded from view, leaving only the world. Kevin settled into the neighboring chair with his usual caution, testing it with his weight before trusting it, and the wood held up.

“I hope you came prepared,” said the mayor. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“We’ve come, sir.” Jack set the leather briefcase down on the free space on the table, unzipped it, and pulled out the two copies of the contract, aligning them before the old man with a care that was half respect and half theatrics. “I hope you’re in agreement with both of us.”

And then he leaned back, crossed his hands on his knee, crossed his legs, and composed the most tranquil expression in his vast and entirely false repertoire. Inside, the thorn in his side had risen to his stomach. A million a month. He had written the number at three in the morning with a steady pen, and now, before the man who was about to read it, the number seemed at once an obscene fortune and an amateur’s guess. He didn’t know how much a hero charged. He didn’t know how much Vought, which held eight out of ten protection contracts in the country, charged, and he didn’t know how much the independent agencies vying for the leftovers charged. He had tried to research, in the early hours of the morning, on this world’s rickety internet, and found only magazine issues, appearance fees, gossip. The real value, the one that was signed, lay behind doors he hadn’t yet learned to open. So he had guessed high, within what shame allowed, and now he was going to find out from the client’s face whether the guess had been high, low, or ridiculous.

There was one more thing he knew, and to which he clung while the mayor pulled the first window for himself: there was a reason that man had driven Vought out of town and had endured, for months, the outcry from the council, the businessmen, and half the newspapers demanding its return. Jack didn’t need to know the market price to know that, in the mayor’s place, he too would prefer anything to reopening that door. That was leverage. He just didn’t know how much.

The mayor placed his cigar in the glass ashtray, adjusted his glasses, and began to read.

It’s a lion.

It wasn’t a courtesy reading. Jack watched the old man’s eyes scan each line with the speed of someone who understands what they’re reading, saw his finger go back two paragraphs to check a definition, saw the white eyebrow register the confidentiality clause with a minimal movement that could be approval or amusement. Silence settled in the office and remained. The hum of the computer. A phone ringing in the distance, in another room, and no one answering. The smoke from the abandoned cigar rising from the ashtray in a thin, straight line until it dissipated. Kevin, beside him, had entered his mode of total immobility, that stone-like state that men his size learn to avoid appearing threatening, and Jack kept his hands crossed on his knees and his face serene as he counted the minutes by the line of smoke.

Ten. Ten whole minutes, and the old man didn’t say a word until the last page of the second copy, which he checked against the first in a quick gesture, like someone who’s caught many people with discrepancies between copies.

Then he put down the papers, took off his reading glasses, and smiled.

“Anything else?”

Jack blinked. “No.”

“Excellent.”

The mayor reached for his jacket.

There were pens on the table. Jack counted four without looking, one of them on a marble stand with a commemorative plaque, and yet the old man’s hand reached over them all and slipped into the inside pocket of his own jacket, from which emerged a black pen with gold details, heavy just to look at, the kind of object that passes through generations within a family or a position. He uncapped it slowly, found the first signature field, and, without lifting his eyes from the paper, answered the question Jack hadn’t asked.

“Special situations require special instruments.”

The pen ran across the paper with a dry scratch. A signature, the initials on the pages, the second copy, all in the same steady, unceremonious rhythm of a man who’d been signing his whole life and knew that the ink was the easy part. Jack followed the movement with a strange sensation rising in his chest, which he hesitated to name because he’d never felt it before in that exact way. He was watching his own existence change legal category. Each stroke of that pen converted two street criminals into municipal service providers.

And it was precisely because he was so attentive that strangeness prevailed over prudence.

“You didn’t even try to negotiate.”

The mayor finished his last signature before answering. He clicked the cap back on the pen, returned it to his pocket, and only then did he raise his face, and on his face was a frank, almost paternal amusement, which made Jack feel ten years younger than he was.

“My young friend.” The old man leaned back and retrieved his cigar from the ashtray. “You clearly have no idea how much a hero agency charges for the annual protection of a city, do you?”

Jack held her gaze. Lying there wouldn’t get him anywhere. “No, sir. That’s information I don’t have.”

“It’s obvious you don’t have it.” The mayor pulled out his cigar, and the ember lit his white beard underneath. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked for so little.”

The silence that followed lasted long enough for Jack to feel his own face wanting to furrow and half-hold it back. Just barely. He had spent the night fearing the number by excess, and the number had erred by deficiency. Somewhere behind him, almost inaudible, Kevin exhaled slowly through his nose, the sound of a man doing calculations he’d rather not be doing.

“Relax.” The mayor waved the smoke away with his free hand, and the amusement in his eyes turned to something more serious. “You didn’t lose out. You lost a lot, but you didn’t lose out, and I’ll explain the difference, because from today you work for this city, and I don’t like partners operating in the dark.” He pointed the cigar at the signed contract. “A large superhero agency, one of those linked to a big company, charges a city like San Diego somewhere between fifty and eighty million a year, depending on the agency and the catalog of heroes it provides. Per year, young man. And that’s the list price, before add-ons, and these people love add-ons. Public events are add-ons. Overtime on patrol is add-ons. Heroes injured in the line of duty, the city pays the insurance. You two just asked for twelve million annually for the full service.” He let the number settle. “I read your contract twice looking for a catch. There isn’t one. There’s just a guy who doesn’t know his own pricing. If I tried to negotiate it down, I wouldn’t be negotiating. I’d be stealing, and I steal less than people say.”

Jack stared at the old man, and what he felt, beneath the immediate sting of pride, was the old gears of his head turning and reclassifying everything. Fifty to eighty million. Vought didn’t sell protection. It sold dependency with a monthly fee. And he had just unknowingly positioned himself as the cheap alternative on the market, which stung his vanity and was, from the cold, hard-won perspective he always ended up having, a strategically perfect position for a newcomer: nobody suspects the cheap supplier, nobody wages a price war with someone charging a sixth of the standard rate, and a small contract gets renegotiated after it becomes indispensable. He had gotten the number wrong but played the game right. It would hurt less tomorrow.

“Furthermore,” the mayor continued, now leaning forward and pushing aside a stack of folders with his forearm to gain a few more inches of desk space, “I’ll compensate for the difference in a currency worth more than the difference. Let me tell you what the hard part of this business is, since you went into it without reading the manual. The hard part isn’t the work. There’s never been a shortage of people willing to take a beating for money. The hard part, for someone like you, is trust. A hero only legally exists when they’re clinging to something: a large company, a municipal contract, a structure that answers for them when the glass breaks. Without that, what you are, technically, I won’t even say aloud with the contract still cooling on the table. And building that structure from scratch, alone, without a godfather?” He shook his head slowly. “It takes years. It costs a fortune in lawyers, insurance, licenses, government officials looking you in the face and deciding whether to sign. It’s a wall built precisely so that people like you can’t get through. Vought loves this wall. They helped build it, brick by brick, law by law.”

He pointed the cigar at Jack, and the ember stopped half a meter from his chest like a lit finger.

“I’ll get you over the wall. I’ll handle the paperwork to register an agency for you. Paperwork, license, signatures from those who need to sign. I know the ins and outs of this process better than its tailors.” The old man leaned back again. “Meanwhile, the only thing I ask of you is one thing. Find a man. Someone you trust, suitable for the job, because an agency needs an administrative face, someone who answers the phone, signs documents, and exists in the registry office without needing to exist on a rooftop. When you find someone, tell me their name, and I’ll build the rest around them.”

Jack nodded slowly, and behind the gesture his head had already darted towards the problem. A trusted man. The inventory of people Jack trusted in this world would fit in the chair next to him, with room to spare. This needed to be resolved, and resolved well, because an administrative face was also the gateway for anyone who wanted to reach them from the inside. Another item on the list. The list kept growing, and he had begun to suspect that this was the definitive format of his life now.

But he understood what was being offered, and he understood the scale of it. What he and Kevin had been doing up until now was marginal work, night hunts at small outposts that yielded little more than the cost of the hunts, a dead-end job practiced in the gap between the police and the gangs. The contract on the table changed the nature of the whole thing. A million a month was, before anything else, the end of a ghost: the debt to Kevin’s uncle, which the two carried without mentioning, would die with the first payment, and there would still be enough left over to equip the warehouse properly. And that was just the basics. Jack looked at the signed number and saw through it, as he saw through walls with his glasses: the large cartels’ warehouses, the vaults that held what the gangs really moved, everything he had been postponing due to lack of structure and legal cover. The city had just committed to paying him a salary to do what he was already going to do for free, and to lend him the police as a support service. The mayor thought he had hired cheap protection. I did. I just didn’t know yet that I had also just financed a hunting operation whose real profit would never appear on any invoice.

One step. It was just one step, and Jack knew how to count the remaining ones. But it was the first step he had ever taken in this world with the entire ground beneath his feet.

“Questions?”, said the mayor.

“Several,” said Jack. “But none for today.”

“Good answer. Today’s will arrive on their own.” The old man glanced over their shoulder toward the door. “In fact, they’ve arrived.”

The office door opened without a knock, which already revealed who it was before even showing himself. Captain Jones entered with his cap tucked under his arm and his navy blue uniform pressed with the same severity as his face, and crossed the office to the side of the desk with the economical gait of someone who never learned to walk aimlessly. His hard eyes swept over the scene once, the signed contract, the two copies, the two young men in suits, and cataloged everything before his mouth moved.

“Everything alright, gentlemen?” The voice came out in the same sharp tone as always, without any unnecessary ceremony. “Do we have our heroes?”

“We have it.” The mayor pushed one of the copies a few inches across the table toward the captain, like showing him a fish he’d caught. “Signed, registered, and cheaper than you bet. You owe me dinner.” Jones didn’t smile, but something in his eyes did the work of a smile. The mayor turned to Jack. “I’ll take care of setting up the agency. While the paperwork is being processed, the captain will prepare you.”

Jones nodded once, briefly, and Jack understood that this nod contained an entire program that no one was going to detail today. “Preparing” coming from a man like that wasn’t going to be a lecture. It was going to be procedure: what separates a prison sentence that stands up in court from one that crumbles at the first hearing, how to handle a scene without contaminating it, what can and cannot come out of their mouths near a lawyer, radio codes, chain of custody, all the bureaucratic grammar of legalized violence that Jack had never needed to learn because until Friday he was the problem, not the solution. He discovered he didn’t care. A tool was a tool.

“And besides,” said the mayor, “we need a service.”

He stood up. He did it the way Jack had seen him do in the shed, slowly, drawing the attention of the entire room to the movement, and walked around the table to the wide window, turning his back to the beautiful, deceptive view, with the whole city serving as a backdrop, and Jack suspected that the old man knew exactly the effect of that, and that he had already used that window in more negotiations than the portraits in the hallway could count.

“You two have been around for two weeks, and the city already knows.” The mayor gestured with his cigar, and the smoke outlined the argument in the air. “They know wrong, they know halfway, they know by rumor, but they know. There’s a shaky video circulating on that social network. There are people swearing they saw a giant. There are mothers locking their children in the house, not knowing if the new creature on the street is for or against them. A rumor is an animal that grows the way we let it, and until now we let it loose because it served its purpose. It doesn’t serve its purpose anymore. From today on, you are a public investment, and public investment is announced.” His hands opened in the air, framing an invisible headline against the window. “Blood heroes of the city. A new hope. Something along those lines. San Diego didn’t buy protection from outside this time, San Diego created its own. Born here, from the streets here, from the blood here. That’s the story, and it’s a good story, and the best part is that it happens to be true.”

Jack felt his face contort before he could stop it, and he didn’t stop it because a part of him wanted the old man to see.

Advertisement. Headline. The word the mayor hadn’t yet uttered hung over all the others: image. He was going to become a product. He was going to have a face in the newspaper, a stage name discussed in meetings, maybe an official color, who knows, a slogan. It was the part of the job he least wanted, the Vought part of the work, the golden veneer on the machine, and at the same time, even as his resentment grew, the other Jack, the one who did the accounts, was already on the other side of the counter looking at the same merchandise. Image was an asset. An advertised hero demands an appearance, licenses a name, opens doors that no one can break down. Vought had built an empire on that, which meant that it sustained empires. He could hate the fan and open the fan at the same time. He had already made peace with worse contradictions.

“I assume the captain will help us with that too,” Jack said, leaving a dry end to the sentence, because the image of Jones directing a photo shoot had its value.

“More or less.” The mayor returned to his chair. “He’ll help with his part. The choreography of the presentation, the first public event, what the press will be able to see and what they won’t. The packaging is up to my marketing manager, who will contact you later this week, and I’m warning you now: he’s insufferable and he’s good, and you’ll have to swallow both things together, because one doesn’t come without the other.”

“You’ve described half the useful people I’ve ever met.”

“I described them all.” The mayor set his cigar down in the ashtray and reached across the table. “We have a deal, then.”

Jack stood up. The old man’s hand was dry and firm, a hand that still gripped as if carrying something, and he squeezed it back just right, neither showy nor courteous.

“Thank you, Mayor. I hope I can contribute to the protection of the city.”

“If what you’ve shown so far is indeed what you do,” said the old man, and something flashed past behind his eyes—the reports he’d read, the backyard Jones had described, the twenty-nine arrests in a single night—”and I suspect you’ve shown too little, then the gangs in this city have just become a problem with an expiration date. And I don’t buy anything in this life that outlasts me, young man, so cherish the optimism while it’s fresh.”

He shook Kevin’s hand next, and Jack saw the old man closely measure, for the first time, the true size of his friend, the grip rising up an arm that the fine wool only disguised to a certain extent, and saw the quick, satisfied calculation pass across the mayor’s face as if checking the merchandise and approving it.

“I’m looking forward to what we’re going to build together,” said Jack, already tucking their copy of the contract into his folder.

“Likewise.” The mayor sat down again, and before they even reached the door, his hand had already pulled the next stack of folders, his reading glasses were already back on his nose, the office was already forgetting them. But his voice still reached them on the threshold, piercing the hum of the old computer, and it carried the last trace of a smile inside. “I hope to exceed your expectations, Mr. Mayor. That’s what you were going to say on your way out, wasn’t it? You can keep it in mind. Exceed mine, and I guarantee you’ll exceed yours.”

Jack paused at the door for half a second.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and left.

The marble corridor returned them to the world with portraits of dead men watching over them, and the two walked a stretch in silence, their footsteps hitting the worn floor, passing through the same darkened rooms, which now, for some reason Jack would take a while to admit, seemed less like a diagnosis and more like a to-do list. It was Kevin who spoke first, his voice low, still somewhat incredulous, his fingers finally loosening the cuff of his shirt.

“One million per month.”

“Twelve per year.”

“And we asked for very little.” Kevin shook his head slowly. “My father would disown my last name if he knew.”

“He’ll know.” Jack adjusted the briefcase under his arm, took his glasses from the inside pocket and opened them with a twist of his wrist, and the building’s blueprint flashed back into view, the columns, the ducts, all the exits. “Next week, at the latest, your name will be on an agency’s register and your face will be on a city hall ad.”

There was a pause. Kevin’s step missed by half a measure.

“I was so happy,” he said to the runner. “Those were a really good forty minutes.”

Jack pushed open the front door, and San Diego greeted them with sunshine.