It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter

"Shit."

Thorner looked at Jeopardy. "What now?"

"He's there, he's in the church and he's gone down to the bunker."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I can't track him underground but he's down there."

They were only perhaps ten minutes behind Tanner Griffen, but that was a lifetime. Thorner thought about what Griffen - either Griffen - could do in a confined space in 10 minutes. Kruke seemed like a tough guy, but his tech crew would be worse than useless to him and whatever Griffen was, he was dangerous. He willed the Volvo to go faster, and simultaneously prayed it would keep going at all.

David had been quiet in the back for the past half an hour. Jeopardy swivelled in her chair to look at him. "You OK back there?"

David grunted. He was still shirtless, and smeared in blood. He didn't know how he felt about killing himself. He knew what he was capable of, and if whoever was using his old profile had done their homework, he would be as ruthless as David. More so in fact, without the beige handcuff on his wrist tethering him to civilised society. This prospect scared him.

The town sign for Fort Smith flew past the vehicle. "Alright, here we are," said Thorner, guiding the battered car up the main street and skidding to a halt in front of the church steps. "Anything from Kruke?"

"Nothing," said Jeopardy, "let's get in there."

They emptied themselves out of the cramped Volvo and sprinted up the concrete church steps and into the lobby. The receptionist smiled blankly at Thorner, not recognising him as they blustered into the building. "Good morning!" she said gaily to their disappearing backs as they ran into the church and down the central passageway.

A few townsfolk looked up briefly, annoyed at the distraction. Thorner reached the trapdoor first.

"Wait, I'll go first," said Jeopardy, cocking the revolver in her hand. She cautiously opened the trapdoor and started gingerly down the steel ladder, followed by Thorner and David.

When she got to the bottom, she crept down the dimly lit corridor, listening for sounds of a struggle - there were none, just the usual humming, pinging and ticking of the computer equipment and the occasional low murmur from one tech to another. She peered around the corner. All the techs were in their usual places, working contentedly in much the same way hamsters run on wheels.

Suddenly, Kruke walked around the edge of the central computer bank, leaning over the shoulder of one of his operatives and pointing at a screen. Jeopardy stepped out and he saw her.

"Ah! Jeopardy! You're here, I saw you approach in a hell of a rush - what's going on, and why have you brought David back?"

"Where's Griffen?" asked Jeopardy, coldly.

Kruke smiled and waved his finger. "Dear child, you still have much to learn. Griffen isn't here. Well, he was - but he's not anymore."

Jeopardy looked confused, annoyed. Thorner and David entered the room, David lowering his machete almost disappointedly. "What do you mean?"

Kruke puffed out his chest, looked pleased with himself. "We've been tracking the Griffen profile since the murder of the Senator, and we've watched it come back home to roost, as it were. However, we were never in any danger. There were certain aspects of his behaviour that weren't right, weren't congruent with his personality or his geographical location. This is a subtle game, Jeopardy - that's the beauty of it, the art of it. You can't just set a profile going and expect it to run like a real human would without a great deal of expertise."

"What are you talking about?" said Thorner, who was not following Kruke at all.

"Hello again, Mr Thorner, David," he nodded at them both, then motioned to the screen he was watching when they had come into the room. "Look, here are a few examples. After the murder at the hotel, Griffen goes down to the basement and into a car, then leaves and comes straight back here. Strange thing to do, really, but stranger things have happened. Now, halfway down Route 40, he's cut off by what looks like two Sec officers in a Sec vehicle. They set up a roadblock but he just sails straight through it, not around it, just through it. Doesn't change speed, direction, no flicker on his biometrics to show adrenaline dump or increased heart rate. That's not right. He's kept exactly 90mph the entire trip, and no human could do that, even with cruise control. And the real kicker is, everywhere he stops, nobody makes any social updates or notes that they've just had public enemy number one in their refuelling station or grocery store. He's a ghost."

"So it was some kind of AI?" said Thorner.

"Kind of - but not really artificial intelligence in the old sense. It's real intelligence, it's Griffen's intelligence, based on every scrap of information in his old profile. His behavioural patterns, his preferences, the whole deal. It just so happens that in this case, the task was programmed poorly, didn't account for nuances."

"Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know, maybe it was done in a rush, whoever grabbed the profile used it pretty quickly after David vacated it."

"But wait a minute," said Thorner, rubbing his forehead. He'd just realised how tired he was, how old he was. "How can a computer program commit murder?"

Kruke shrugged and smiled again. "It didn't, Mr Thorner. It was just in the room while someone else did."

Thorner heard Jeopardy's leather creak next to him as she shifted uncomfortably.

"There's one thing I think you're missing, Kruke," said Thorner.

Kruke looked genuinely surprised, like a man who wasn't used to being wrong.

"I think I know why Griffen came back here."

"Pray, enlighten us!"

"This is a trap. Griffen knew - the creator of the Griffen profile knew - that we'd chase it. That's why it had us loop round and come back here. Someone wants us all together, here."

Thorner looked at the faces around him. Kruke looked puzzled. David looked terrified, nervous, like a junkie too long without a fix. Jeopardy looked icy cold, her empty hand twitching, agitated. The techs sat in front of the computers, oblivious to the conversation around them. A silence fell in the room like heavy velvet.

"Fine," said Jeopardy. She took three stiletto gunshot steps to the centre of the room and wheeled around, levelling her revolver at Thorner. "I think it's high time we all had a little chat. Why don't you have a seat over there, gentlemen?"

Kruke's face was unreadable, but somewhere between rage, disappointment, and betrayal. "Jeopardy, what on earth is going on? Put that gun down at once!"

"Sorry Bill, I'm afraid I can't do that - we're not in that stage of the game. If it helps, you're not my boss anymore, you never were, so as I've got the weapon - just do as I say." She waved the three men over to the spartan steel table and chairs in the corner. They all cautiously and unwillingly sat down.

"Geeks, leave," Jeopardy barked over her shoulder. The techs woke up from their Grid stupor and ambled and waddled out of the room and up the steel ladder to the church. The sight of the real-life firearm was all the convincing they needed.

"Now, how can I break this down for you all?" she began, condescendingly. The revolver was still aimed unwaveringly at the group, none of them in any doubt that she would use it if they made a move towards her.

"Who killed Senator Rigsby?" demanded Thorner. Jeopardy tutted and shook her black bob from side to side. Her cruel red lips split into a smile.

"Not so fast, Henry my dear. All in good time. I want to see how much of this you can work out for yourselves, it will be amusing. David?"

David snapped back into the room, his mind and eyes had been somewhere else up to this point. "Huh?"

"Who do you think hired you to steal the data from Wichita?"

"I didn't steal any data from Wichita," he said, slowly, in a confused torpor. It appeared his psyche was breaking down, the events of the past couple of days finally pulling the last remaining support structure from his personality. Jeopardy found this tremendously annoying.

"Okay, when you were Griffen, remember? You stole some memory cards in a very clumsy and inefficient manner, yes?"

"Yeah okay."

"Who hired you?"

"I don't know."

Jeopardy sighed. "There was only one organisation with the funds to pull off the extraction, and pay for Kruke's services, and all the rest of it."

David looked blankly at her, like he didn't follow and didn't care. His eyes were glassy. His brain defragging.

"OraCorp," deadpanned Thorner. "OraCorp hired him to steal their own data."

"Well done Henry!" Jeopardy made a small, sarcastic clapping motion with her left hand on the barrel of the revolver. "I'm glad someone's paying attention."

"Alright," said Thorner, "so why would OraCorp hire a punk hacker to steal their own data, then spend their own money to give the thief a new identity?"

"Ha! Well, this is the interesting bit, Mr Thorner - gumshoe extraordinaire. OraCorp don't care about Tanner Griffen, or whoever he becomes after that. In all honesty - and I can say this from my position - they don't care about any of us. We're literally little fleshy tools to make things happen in the real, off-Grid world that the Grid can't touch. Sometimes these things are kind of messy, and that can cause a problem."

"That doesn't explain why they would want their own data stolen," said Thorner, genuinely puzzled.

"Who gives a fuck about the data?" exploded Jeopardy, waving the revolver at them. "The data was just a way to put Griffen in an untenable position. When he uploaded it from the auto-drone when he was being extracted, it went straight back into the OraCorp databases. It never left their hands, you get it? The data was a tool to put Griffen on the run. I thought you were getting this. What happened next, Thorner?"

"Griffen comes to Kruke for his services, which they had already paid for up front. He gets a nice shiny new profile." As he spoke, it became crystal clear, and he felt like an idiot for not spotting it sooner. "This left the Tanner Griffen profile empty, available as a patsy to commit the murder of the Senator. Very clever."

Jeopardy looked smug. "Isn't it? You know the funny thing? This kind of stuff happens all the time. You might not always hear about it, but whenever there's a political assassination, or a smear campaign needs some hard physical evidence, or whatever, there's always some miscreant involved who dies mysteriously shortly afterwards, or he's gunned down by some Sec grunt who gets his fifteen minutes of fame to go on the talk shows and boast about how he offed the man who offed his boss. Nice and tidy. The fact is, Senator Joe Rigsby was becoming a real pain in the ass for OraCorp. People were starting to listen to his anti-Grid babbling and it was starting to affect share prices. He had to go, and with Tanner Griffen under OraCorp control, they just put his profile in the hotel room when some Sec special ops guy killed the Senator and his right-hand man, then that was that. Public enemy number one, at least until the next decent news story."

"So what's your part in all this?" Kruke finally spoke. His voice was that of a defeated man, cracked and parched.

"Oh, I'm just on the payroll like anyone else," said Jeopardy in a singsong voice, "don't take it personally old man - I was here to keep an eye on your operation. You should be grateful, really - OraCorp sent you almost all your clients, and every time you sent a fresh new person out into the world, the one you left behind was taken control of by OraCorp and used for whatever they wanted. If you'd spent as much time tracking the old profiles as you did the new, you'd have spotted this trend, how the old profiles always ended up dead after committing some crime or other."

"But why did you agree to go after the Griffen profile, if you knew it was a patsy? Why bring David and I along for the ride?" said Thorner.

Jeopardy grunted. "You see these two arm pieces? I told you, one for the Grid and one for Kruke. I get my orders through the Grid, so all the time I'm in this stinking rat hole, I'm out of contact. I had to go along with Kruke's stupid plan until I got topside and got new instructions from the Company. They told me to chase Griffen back here with you both so I could tidy up all the loose ends."

Kruke looked at the floor. "I can't believe it. I treated you like a daughter."

"Yeah, well, you'll forgive me if I don't have much of a need for father figures anymore Kruke. I'm interested in money and looking after number one."

"What about the Freemen, how do they play into this?" asked Thorner.

"They don't, they were a little fly in the ointment, very irritating," replied Jeopardy, "they really screwed up the timeline to be honest with you. It wouldn't be hard for the company to wipe them out but they're a threat to good, Grid-fearing folk so they keep people on the straight and narrow. They're actually great advertising for the on-Grid lifestyle, if the alternative involves driving an old rust bucket around the desert, smelling of piss and eating roadkill."

"So what now?" asked David, his jaw moving in slow motion, physically disconnected from his brain stem, down for maintenance.

"Well, as Mr Thorner here rightly guessed, the Griffen profile was a mechanism to get you all back here, because the last part of my mission is to close up Kruke's shop. Too many people know about it, and there's a couple of Sec guys chasing the Griffen profile who will end up here before too long. Your cover's been blown, Kruke - and there are scores of operations like this all over the country that the company can use instead."

Kruke looked crestfallen. His little empire, crushed by a slip of a girl, right under his nose. He felt small, insignificant and foolish for ever having thought he could operate above the Grid, above Ora, above OraCorp itself.

"Come on Bill, you didn't really think you could hide from the company by sitting in a basement all day? You wildly underestimate the power and reach of the system. They can see everything if they want to. The things they don't see, they're just the things that they can't monetise or advertise to. It's that simple. It's not an evil empire, it's just a business like any other."

Thorner was about to lose his temper. "A business like any other? How can you say that? Businesses shouldn't have people assassinated, run governments and public services, they shouldn't control what people do, think, say - if OraCorp is truly driven by profits, it doesn't have to do all this to get them!"

With pity in her eyes, Jeopardy turned to Thorner. "Thorner. Listen to me, the Grid is just a tool. People made it what it is and OraCorp just supply where there's a demand. The connections are useless to me, but I'm damaged. I'm not like normal people. Normal people - good people - they need the Grid now. They need to stay connected, it's part of being human."

"It's nothing about being human!" shouted Thorner, "Freeman was right, it's an abomination!"

Jeopardy shook her head and looked down at her arm piece, she made a few light gestures and flicked her finger towards one of the large monitors stacked beside her.

"Thorner, I've been looking into you and who you are. As soon as OraCorp knew you were accompanying Griffen, they sent me your full file. It's a big file, Thorner, bigger than you can ever imagine. I read it on our little road trip together. I know about your life, I know what you've lost. I know about Martha."

Thorner felt rage building up inside, not triggered by this new knowledge of OraCorp's intrusion into his life, but that Jeopardy had used Martha's name. Nobody had the right to say that name but him, not now. He felt his face flush, tasted the metallic tang of blood.

"Look, Thorner," Jeopardy motioned towards the monitor screen. Martha's face took up the top left hand corner. Thorner's stomach flipped, he looked away. "Look!" Jeopardy insisted, and despite himself he turned his eyes back to the glowing screen.

It was Martha's profile. Thorner had only ever seen it briefly over her shoulder when she was alive, and had assumed it had long been deleted, but in fact the opposite was true. Her profile was alive with old photographs, recently added by her friends - Martha laughing at a hen party years ago, tagged by the bride to be. Status updates mentioned her, the most recent only a few days ago, an ex-work colleague reminiscing about a presentation she had delivered while alive. Other, more personal remembrances littered the screen, 'MARTHA WILL NVR 4GET U LUV SIS', 'BEST BOSS I EVR HD RIP' and on it went, seemingly every day someone on the Grid would mention Martha Thorner and her profile buzzed and glowed with the activity. She was alive. In a strange way, the Grid served as a kind of afterlife that enabled anyone she had touched during her actual lifetime to remember her, and still communicate with her through shared memories and experiences to which she was party.

Thorner broke down and openly wept. The revolver pointing at him could not have been further from his mind. He wanted to join her, even though he would not enjoy her perpetuity - all that was left was for him to hope for some kind of old-timey heaven, like the old preachers used to speak of in his father's day. Maybe then he could see Martha again. Surely OraCorp didn't own heaven?

"Do you see, Thorner?" asked Jeopardy in a low voice that seemed to come from inside his skull, "The Grid is there to help people, to connect them and keep them connected. In order to do that it has to continue, and that means OraCorp must continue, no matter what the cost. If a few dissenting voices have to be silenced so that people can stay on the Grid, surely that's a small price to pay?"

Thorner didn't answer - couldn't answer. His throat was choked with tears, his eyes blind with them.

"We're all just small cogs in the big machine, Thorner," she continued, gently. "I do what I can - it's too late for me to join the rest of society, I've made too many enemies. You never had this excuse. You should have joined up, maybe you wouldn't have been so lonely. Maybe you'd have had a better relationship with your daughter."

Thorner looked up at the blurry black clad shape, the red lips like the tail lights of a car in torrential rain. "Fuck you," he managed to whisper through grief-swollen lips. He slumped to the floor, his head in his hands.

"Jeopardy, stop this immediately," ordered Kruke, standing up sharply. His military bearing and stern manner unbent by the sudden swing in power.

Jeopardy casually turned to him, raised the revolver and shot him through the heart. The report of the gun was deafening in the small space and it reverberated around the curved walls longer than it took Kruke's body to collapse onto the table, and from there onto the ground. He was dead, his shirt spreading deep, dark red.

David jumped up instinctively and Thorner snapped out of his melancholy far enough to scramble backwards under the table. Jeopardy took two steps back and levelled the gun at the two remaining men.

"Well, gentlemen. I suppose this is goodbye."

David stared at Jeopardy. His personality was flickering, twitching between two poles. His mind was like a video stream not fully buffered, switching from a horror movie to a family cartoon and back a thousand times a second. He could no longer attach his physical form to the profile ident at the top left of his arm piece's screen, or to the thoughts in his head. Everything was disconnected, live wires sparking in the darkness, dangerous.

Time ground to a halt. He rewound his memory like scrubbing the transport bar on a film clip, searching for that one moment that revealed to himself who he really was. David Wilkinson was the official answer, Tanner Griffen having become detached and now leading his own life - he had been told to let that go. He had been told that option was no longer available to him. But when his depressing beige arm piece had been taken from him, he reverted to being Griffen at the Freeman stronghold to get them out, and it felt good. It felt genuinely good, ecstasy even, to plunge his short pocketknife into the young guard's throat. The warmth of the other man's blood on his skin felt like home to him.

David Wilkinson listened to R&B and chart hits. He subscribed to instant newsletter information from chain stores and shopped wherever the personalised billboard advertisements told him to. He didn't believe in sex before marriage and chastised anyone who used curse words on his profile timeline. Could he really inhabit this shell? He was more worried that he could, that he would be swallowed up by this middle of the road, inoffensive, decent person and that he would like it. He would meet a mousey, quiet girl and settle down and that they would have plump little children who got good grades at school. He would have to get a real job, with a boss, and do what he was told. He would have to conform.

He looked down at Kruke's body, the chest wound bubbling softly. He had never had a father, his junkie mother had never known his biological dad and he had never been interested in finding him. Kruke, intellectually at least, was the closest thing to a father figure he had. And now, he had been taken away by this girl, working on behalf of the global colossus he had spent a lifetime robbing from, mocking, damaging in any way he could. Was he in some way to blame for Kruke's death? Had he, and digital criminals like him, driven the company to these kinds of tactics? Maybe his resistance had somehow legitimised the use of murder, force, kidnap and profile theft by the enemy. Maybe he had more of a part to play than he cared to admit in this culture of subdued, secretive violence.

Suddenly, Jeopardy's attention was snapped to the other end of the room by heavy footsteps down the corridor.

Jeopardy span around to point the revolver at the source of the noise. A scruffy-looking man in a bloodstained brown suit stood at the entrance to the bunker, a modern-looking energy weapon held in his hand. It was pointed directly at Jeopardy.

"Officer Doherty, OraCorp Security Division. Put down your weapon immediately," he barked, out of breath but still hanging onto the last threads of authority.

Jeopardy just looked at him, her weapon staring back, unblinking shiny chrome.

Doherty's eyes flicked from Jeopardy, to the older man with bleary eyes sat under the table, to the shirtless young man in slacks, and finally to the dead man on the floor in front of them. "What the fuck is going on here?"

Jeopardy sighed, looking nonchalant. Her revolver didn't waver an inch. "It looks like we've got a stalemate, Officer," she purred.

"Who the hell are you?" demanded Doherty.

"That doesn't matter now. Not really. We share the same employer, you and I. It's possible we've been working at cross-purposes for some time, and what you see here is the outcome."

"Is that Kruke?" he motioned to the corpse.

"Yes, it was. I have my orders, just like you."

"My orders are to capture Tanner Griffen, and I just saw my partner get blown in half, so you'll pardon me if I seem a little edgy, but where the fuck is that little punk?"

"He's right here, Officer." She motioned behind her to where David was shivering, blood smeared, in the shadows. Doherty squinted at the scrawny youth, it could be Griffen, if he'd cleaned up a bit and had his tattoos removed.

"No! No. I'm, I'm David Wilkinson!" cried David, obstinately. Doherty was rapidly losing patience.

"And who's that?" Doherty motioned to Thorner, who suddenly became aware of himself again and stood up.

Thorner steeled himself and spoke. "I'm a consultant. I was hired to find Tanner Griffen."

Doherty looked exasperated, tired. He turned his attention back to Jeopardy. "Miss, drop your fucking weapon."

Jeopardy took a step forward and raised her revolver. Suddenly she jerked violently forward, then lay sprawled on the concrete floor. David had tackled her viciously from behind and was proceeding to scramble for her weapon hand. She writhed underneath him, spinning around to face him so he was on top of her, wrestling with her wrists. His face was mad, gleeful - Tanner Griffen was in motion, like some primal force that devoured chaos and spat out violence and malevolence.

"Run! Get out, all of you! NOW!" he screamed to Thorner and Doherty. Thorner needed no further convincing and sprinted past the tangle of limbs on the floor and past Doherty to the corridor. Looking back he saw Doherty pause, then start to back out of the bunker.

On the cold concrete floor, Griffen seemed stronger than the last time they had fought, his muscles supercharged by some sense of righteous indignation. He had clamped Jeopardy's hips to the floor with his own, entwining her legs with his, and was pulling her revolver down over her head and between the two of them.

Jeopardy was convinced he was trying to shoot her in the abdomen with her own weapon, but as he painfully wrenched her right wrist round and away from her, she realised the muzzle of the gun was now pointed directly into his own centre of mass. The barrel pushed deep into his pale flesh, icy cold and unforgiving.

"Do it," he hissed into her face, close enough that his spittle sprayed her. "Fucking do it, bitch."

She felt his hand close tighter on her own, squeezing her trigger finger. She felt the hammer pull back, digging sharply into her own ribs, until it reached the point where it could only strike. The bullet left the barrel in a spear of searing hot gas, entering Griffen's chest and tearing without resistance through his body as if his bones, muscle and flesh were an afterthought.

On the way through, the amount of trauma was more than sufficient to send an instantaneous signal to the egg-sized black implant located under Griffen's sternum. It dutifully detonated, and the chemical reaction that resulted tore first his body apart, then Jeopardy's, before continuing to expand with blistering speed to engulf the entire bunker in white heat. Plastics and metals vaporised, the concrete floor buckled and shattered, and the pressure in the bunker was such that the entire structure failed massively and every element within it attempted by all laws of physics to get as far away from the other elements as it could.

Doherty and Thorner had kept running once they had vaulted up the steel ladder and out of the trapdoor behind the pulpit. They had kept running all the way down the church hall, and through the lobby. They were halfway down the concrete steps when the explosion threw them both off their feet, and they rolled and caromed down the remaining steps to land in a heap at the bottom. Still scrambling as the ground cracked beneath them they propelled themselves to the other side of the street and threw themselves down on a stubbly patch of yellow grass.

Thorner turned back to the church to see it start to collapse in on itself like damp cardboard. Noise, dust and debris filled the air and chunks of rebar buried themselves in the red Volvo parked outside. Townsfolk were still running from the structure as it folded and twisted. Fallout from the initial blast was only now starting to rain down in a thick, ashen mist.

They lay there a long time, watching the rescue teams screech up to the building, fire hoses aimed over the top of the ruined roof, stretchers entering and emerging, stained red. People crying and wailing, the walking wounded. It was even longer before one of them spoke.

"So what happens now, Officer?" asked Thorner, "You going to take me in?" His body throbbed, every inch of muscle on his weary frame hurt. It was an effort to blink.

Doherty propped himself up on his elbows, shook his head and motioned to his left forearm. "According to this, we've never met."

Thorner pulled back his left coat sleeve and nodded. He sighed deeply. They watched the chaos, observed the scurrying emergency services as they busied themselves like worker ants, collecting and repairing human life. Smoke drifted across their view, and each time it cleared, there was less church, less evidence of Kruke and his business, his double-life. They inhaled, and each time they did, particles of what used to be Jeopardy and Griffen entered their lungs and made them cough.

Presently, Thorner laughed humourlessly to himself. "'It looks like you're writing a letter'."

"What's that?" said Doherty, squinting in the afternoon sun at the older man.

"'It looks like you're writing a letter'. That's the point my father said this all started - where we are now. There used to be a piece of word processing software, and if you started writing a document, a little animated paperclip would pop up and offer you help. It would say 'It looks like you're writing a letter'."

"And was he?"

"Was he what?"

"Was he writing a letter?"

Thorner smiled. "Usually not. But he said that was the point when we stopped watching computers, and they started watching us."

"He may well have been right. I take it you think that's a bad thing?"

"Yes, I do."

"They're just computers, Thorner. They keep getting more and more powerful but they're no substitute for real human interaction, for real feelings and emotions. My partner died today, horribly. Just terrible. I watched him take his last breath. My feelings were as real now as they would have been a hundred years ago. There's a lot of people in this world who want you to believe that Ora, the Grid or whatever is omnipotent, infallible. But I can tell you it's not. It makes mistakes, things fall through the gaps. I thought I knew my partner, I thought I had all his data on my arm piece, but it turns out I didn't know him at all. Not at all. Sometimes you're not writing a letter, you know?"

Thorner knew Doherty was right.

"Should I ask what happened in there?" said Doherty.

Thorner shook his head. "Sorry about your partner."

"Thanks." Doherty stood up and brushed dirt from his trousers. He reached down and helped Thorner to his feet. "What are you going to do now?"

"I guess I'll go back to Tulsa. I think I'll call my daughter."

"You should. Maybe think about getting yourself a profile?"

"I think it's a little bit late for me, Officer."

Doherty smiled. "Fair enough." The two men shook hands and departed in different directions. Doherty turned away, and in the act of no longer observing Henry Thorner, made him disappear.