Chapter 4

4

At times, because of one man’s evil, ten thousand people suffer. So you kill that one man to let the tens of thousands live. Here, truly, the blade that deals death becomes the sword that saves lives.

—Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai

Singapore

Fifteen Years Ago

The Millennium Hotel juts into the Singapore skyline like a giant domino: broad on two sides, thin on the other two, darkened glass gleaming in the harsh sunlight. The air is so humid it’s like trying to breathe underwater, my blazer and khakis sopping up pools of sweat.

The Marina Bay neighborhood is bustling with a lunchtime crowd of locals walking with singular purpose toward lunch and tourists gazing like zoo animals at the sights. The concrete-and-glass architecture is just standard enough that this could stand in for any midsize American city’s financial district. The only differences: no homeless people digging through the garbage or sitting by the curb, and no cops in sight.

Poverty isn’t really a thing here. The only thing thicker than the humidity in Singapore is the money. And as for the cops, that’s a mix of two things: self-policing rooted in national pride, and an Orwellian network of surveillance controlled by an authoritarian regime that enjoys liberal use of the death penalty.

The other main difference is the racial makeup: a preponderance of Chinese people, with a spattering of Indian and Malay, which is pretty representative of the country’s demographics. As an average-looking white guy, I stand out. Not ideal, but not much I can do about it.

I finish pretending to smoke a cigarette and toss it into the waste bin next to me, which is a hundred feet from the front door of the hotel and conveniently located in a rare camera blind spot. The smoldering cigarette lands inside the paper bag I already disposed of, the inside of which I coated with nail polish remover. I don’t wait to see if it catches, I just make my way up the stone path and through the heavy revolving doors into the lobby of the hotel.

The space is grand, just bordering on opulent, full of white marble and gold trim, a contrast to the shadowy fa?ade. The focal point in the middle of the circular lobby is a gurgling fountain, filling the air with an ozone smell, surrounded by people in business wear. There’s a banking conference in town, which brought out just enough white people, so I can blend in a little better. No one pays me any regard, which floods me with a tingle of excitement.

They have no idea what’s about to happen.

By the time I make it to the front desk, someone outside is yelling. All around me, shoulders tense, eyes dart to the front, the tranquil space suddenly filled with tension. At the main desk is a young Malaysian woman in a cream-colored dress, a pastel-pink tudung wrapped around her head and shoulders. She offers a megawatt smile with no eye contact and holds a finger up before hustling to the front. I lean over the counter and slip the USB kill switch into the side of her computer monitor, tap the enter button on the keyboard, and pull it out. It’s in my pocket before she’s left the lobby. I walk toward the elevator bank and climb aboard.

The kill switch disabled the hotel’s cameras and security and erased any video they had stored. It probably screwed up a bunch of other stuff, too. This thing is like dropping a rabid Tasmanian devil into the server room. It’s effective but not discerning. It’ll take a while for hotel security to find the problem and repair it. By the time they do I’ll be gone, all without my face appearing on camera.

At the top floor I step into a quiet, blue-carpeted hallway and head toward the stairwell. I know the hotel is expensive because instead of handles the doors have actual doorknobs. Two more flights up and I find that the door to the roof is locked, but thanks to the kill switch, the alarm won’t be enabled. I use a snake pick to sweep the tumbler, and after a few passes all the pins click into place.

The roof is forty stories up and completely exposed to the brutality of the sun, making it ten times hotter than the ground. The Marina Bay Sands looms in the distance, hazy in the heat. Probably the most signature building in the Singapore skyline, it looks like someone balanced a surfboard across the top of three identical towers. Beyond the Sands is the vast ocean, dotted by massive container ships, stretching out to a smattering of islands and the South China Sea.

From here I can see a good chunk of the country, a bucolic mix of man-made structures and verdant vegetation. Yesterday a chatty cabdriver told me he can bike the circumference of the nation-state in four hours. I’d love to try that, but I suspect I won’t be staying long after this job is done.

I pull the nylon rope and grapple concealed inside my jacket, then shed my top layer, leaving me in a white button-down and khakis, a climbing belt and harness concealed underneath. I would have preferred tactical gear, but this operation presented a number of challenges.

According to the brief, Jonathan Campbell is a CDC biochemist looking to trade his expertise to the highest bidder in return for wiping out his gambling debts and giving him some more money to play with. Since his concentration is biological weapons, this could be bad.

The highest bidder so far is a splinter faction of Islamic jihadists who may or may not be—but probably are—tied to Hezbollah. They’re keeping him in Singapore while they negotiate numbers and sort out the logistics of moving him. There are plenty of casinos to keep him busy and, presumably, enough security to keep him safe.

Campbell spends his nights living large with a battery of ten bodyguards. The buyers have built in a layer of plausible deniability. Instead of sending out men of their own, they’ve hired local Triads. That they’ve survived the sledgehammer of Singapore’s law enforcement means they’re tough. Though not the kind of tough I can’t handle.

Still, I can’t pull off a hit on a casino floor. When Campbell isn’t in the casinos, he’s sleeping it off here, in an executive suite on the top floor. Satellite imagery says there are rarely more than two men in his room, and the rest are in the adjoining rooms or a floor below.

As much as I wish I had more time to plan this out, or at least the cover of darkness, Campbell is only supposed to be here for another day or two. Ravi said the Agency classified this as an ASAP op. If it’s so important, I don’t know why they chose it for my first gig. Maybe it’s a test.

As I stand on the roof, looking out over a foreign country that looks like a city sprung up out of a jungle, the wind whipping at my face, ready to rappel down into a hotel room and murder a bunch of people I’ve never met, I feel a tug in my gut.

This will be the first time I’m taking lives outside the haze of a battle. Shooting someone who’s trying to kill you in the sands of some forgotten corner of hell, that’s not only acceptable, you sometimes get medals for doing it.

There’s something slightly distasteful about this. I feel like I’m hunting deer with a tactical nuke. But I get it. I did the math. Campbell is willing to sell off deadly knowledge and tech, which will likely be turned on Israeli civilians. Biological weapons don’t discriminate between enemy combatants and innocent children. Taking him off the board isn’t a question.

And yet.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.

It’s funny, the thoughts that come to me as I peer over the edge, my stomach doing a drunken flip. The ground is five hundred feet below and I can feel the hum of gravity. Campbell’s balcony is twenty feet down, but I need to land on the far side of it, out of view from the sliding doors. Which means the optimal target is really only four feet by four feet.

Too much to the left, they’ll see me and be ready before I get my bearings.

Too much to the right and I’m going to spend the rest of my life regretting this decision.

All five seconds of it.

It’s better to move than let fear make its case. There’s a pipe at my feet, burrowed into the surface of the roof. I give it a yank to make sure it’s secure, then attach the grapple, loop the nylon rope to the climbing belt, and dangle myself off the edge of the building.

I glance down one more time to situate myself and let go.

My stomach hovers for a moment before I connect with the balcony, and I fold down into a kneeling position to let the impact disperse through my body. I detach the rope and make sure it’s hanging out of view, then reach down and press my fingertips to the rough concrete under my feet, appreciating the solid ground.

And I’m in the shade now, which is a value-add.

Now comes the part I can’t control.

Ravi said that of the two bodyguards who stay in the room with him, one of them is a chain-smoker. The overflowing ashtray on the small patio table confirms this. So I have to wait until he comes out. I can neutralize him, which leaves only two people inside—one of them being Campbell, and he’s not a fighter.

My knuckles crack as I interlace my fingers and stretch out my hands. Given the local government’s delight in using the death penalty, the risk of walking around with a weapon is too high. Not that a gun would have been all that helpful; even with a silencer it would be loud enough to alert people in the surrounding rooms. But these can look like murders, not accidents—apparently someone in some office somewhere wants to send a message—so I don’t need to worry about finesse.

I press my ear to the door. There’s a low murmur inside that could be people talking or could be a vacuum cleaner. That’s the best I can do. I take this as an opportunity to review the floor plan, which I spent the morning committing to memory.

The sliding doors open onto a living room. There should be a coffee table, a couch, and two easy chairs right in front of me. Across from that is a kitchenette, to the right of which is the entryway and a half bath. The bedroom is to the left, with a king bed and a full bathroom beyond that.

After ten minutes I’m getting worried, that maybe they went down to the pool or something. That maybe the hotel will sort out the camera problem before this guy has a nicotine fit. But then a man in a tank top and jeans comes out, his hands cupped to his mouth, from which erupts the familiar scritch of a lighter. He’s Chinese, mid-thirties maybe, with a bodybuilder physique and a round, boyish face. He has a nasty-looking bowie knife tucked into a leather holster on his belt. He takes a deep drag, gazing out over the bay, basking in the breeze coming off the water.

The serenity of the moment.

I wonder what he’s thinking about.

Does he have a girlfriend? A family? Kids?

I push those thoughts away. In this equation he’s a remainder and I need to turn in a clean sheet. He’s still in full view of the sliding doors so I move fast, slipping behind him and hooking my arms around his neck and his forehead. He goes tense, reaching up for me. But before he can get a good grip, I yank hard, separating the vertebrae in his neck with a crack that feels more satisfying than I would care to admit in polite company. As he falls, I slip the knife out of the holster and turn to pull open the sliding door.

At which point I realize our intel was not good.

There are five men in the room.

Two on the couch, one on each easy chair, one across the way at the kitchenette, making himself a cup of tea. They’re dressed as casually as the man I just killed. The coffee table is littered with empty beer bottles and snack wrappers. They’re watching Pretty Woman , the part where Julia Roberts and Richard Gere are shopping.

They all look at me in complete and utter confusion. I catch a glimpse of someone lunging from the bed to the bathroom—probably Campbell.

Adrenaline kicks in and time slows down, giving me a few nanoseconds to calculate the odds here. No one seems to be carrying a gun, but there are most definitely a few more knives in the room. Knife fighting in close quarters means you’re going to have a bad day. I need to even things out. Lucky for me I can see the angles, like they were drawn by a divine hand: what goes where to produce the maximum amount of death.

It’s a little like playing pool.

Scumbag, corner pocket.

The biggest threat is the man by the kitchenette. He’s farthest away from me. He could leave the room to alert others, or find a more useful weapon in the melee. So before anyone can get to their feet I flip the stolen knife in my hand and send it sailing across the room and into his chest. It buries to the hilt and he goes down without a sound, trying to pull it out, dead before he gets a good grip.

Four.

As I’m doing this, the other men shout at each other in Mandarin and get to their feet, so I throw a kick into the easy chair closest to me. The man getting up from it falls into a tangle and crashes into the glass coffee table, sending shards of glass spilling across the floor. His head hits the frame at an odd angle and kinks hard to the side. He doesn’t move after that.

Three.

There’s a heavy glass vase on the table next to me, so by the time the closest thug gets to me, I’ve got it in my hand and arcing toward his head. It connects and shatters, water and petals spilling across his face, the shock traveling up my arm. His eyes dim. Good chance I split his skull like an eggshell.

Two.

The final combatants have had enough time to square up. Both of them are young, buzzing with anger and masculinity, ready to prove themselves. The closest is a slight kid with a shaved head, his body covered in tattoos. He takes out a switchblade and clicks it to full length. I move to my left, putting them in a line so I can focus on him first. He waves the knife around like a kid showing off a lollipop. I throw a hard kick into the side of his knee, snapping it. He goes down yelling and I put my hand on the back of his head and throw him face-first to the ground, then stomp the top of his spine. The yelling stops.

One.

This last guy is tall and slim but carved out of granite. He puts his hands out, palms up, and keeps his distance, marching in little steps that suggests he’s trained in Muay Thai. Just as I set my guard, he lunges forward and snaps a kick at my head, which I barely manage to block. He’s fast. I hop back a little to create some space and figure out the best way to engage him, when something slams into my back, throwing me toward the couch.

I somersault onto the remains of the shattered coffee table, slipping on the glass. There was a sixth man. Probably in the bathroom. He yells for the kickboxer to get help. The man nods and runs for the door.

Great.

I push myself to my feet, ignoring the glass slicing into my palms. The sixth man is older than the others. Long gray hair hanging wild around his head, stout but athletic, and a neutral look on his face like he’s waiting in line for coffee.

Which means he’s the only one of these knuckleheads who’s dangerous.

He pulls out a blade—a short tanto, essentially a shrunken- down samurai sword. I reach out blindly behind me, hoping to grab one of the beer bottles that fell from the shattered coffee table. But I end up with a cushion from the easy chairs, which I hold out like a shield.

He looks at it and laughs, advancing on me, so I throw it at his face, which causes him to instinctively put his arms up. I leap over the couch and throw a swift kick into his midsection. He hits the wall and I follow as hard as I can, throwing my shoulder into his stomach as I grab his arm and control the sword, then slip under him and angle it up to slice open his neck.

He makes a drowning sound, and a geyser of hot, sticky blood sprays both of us. A little gets in my mouth, which ignites something dark and animal inside me. My blood converts to steam and I want to tear his flesh off with my teeth.

No time for indulgences, though.

I grab the tanto and stalk into the bathroom, feeling like I should be wearing a black cloak and carrying a scythe. I find a man cowering by the toilet with his hands up. He matches the picture in the brief—tall, forties, silver hair, skin gray from spending too much time in basement labs.

Campbell.

“I’m sorry, please,” he says, his voice quivering. “I can pay.”

It may not be the field of war, but the man on the balcony, the other men in the room, they were Triad. They were in the game. The potential for death in this life assumed. This man wasn’t in the game, but he decided to join. The knowledge he put up for sale could shift geopolitics and end a lot of lives. Painfully.

“Sorry, bud,” I tell him. “The math isn’t in your favor.”

I grab him by the hair and yank his head up. He squeals like a cat. I sever his carotid artery. He grabs his neck, trying to keep the blood inside. It doesn’t work, spilling between his fingers. He chokes and gags and dies.

There’s shouting from somewhere outside the door. The knob on the front door jiggles. It flies open and the kickboxer comes in, now carrying a gun, and there are more men behind him.

My exit plan—strolling through the front door—is no longer an option. Climbing back up to the roof will take too long. They’ll be on the balcony and aiming comfortably at my ass before I’m halfway up.

Only one way out now.

I make for the sliding doors as bullets slam into the wall behind me. I hope that pipe is strong. I grab the rope and loop it a few times around my hand, and before my brain can take the chance to weigh in, I jump out from the balcony, soaring over downtown Singapore.

Laughter explodes from my chest.

I wonder if the laughing is meant to cover up the fear. But I do a quick inventory and don’t find any. I feel shot through with god-energy, like I can bend the universe—life and death itself—to my will.

It feels good to be good at something.

Then my arm almost yanks out of the socket when I hit the end of the swing and start coming back. I grip the rope with both hands and swing straight for the sliding door of the room one floor below. I kick as I connect with it, shattering it, and tumble inside, landing hard, shards of glass slicing my skin.

The adrenaline is doing a great job, keeping the pain at bay.

Tonight’s going to be a rough one, though.

There’s a heavy, older white man lying on the bed, his body milky white except for his face, which is beet red. A young woman with bronze skin and dark, cascading hair is riding him. The two of them immediately yell and pull at the covers.

“Sorry,” I tell them. I climb to my feet and head for the door. Before I open it, I reach into the closet and pull out a black blazer. The man is much bigger than me so it’ll work to hide some of the blood. I take a quick look in the bathroom mirror. My face is a little cut up and I can’t do much about that.

As I open the door to the hallway there’s a man running past with a gun. I throw a kick and take him clean off his feet, throwing him into the other wall and crumpling him to the ground. I yank the gun from his hand and put a bullet in his head—no sense in playing it safe at this point—then turn toward the end of the hall and see two more men coming at me, guns drawn.

Two more bullets and I’m alone again.

Those guys just came off the stairwell. I bet the rest are headed that way as well. It’s faster. I dive for the elevator and slap the down button. The doors open just as my suspicion is confirmed and the stairwell on the other end of the floor bursts open. I jump onto the elevator and press the close button as many times as I can, praying they don’t make it.

They don’t. The doors close. The other elevator was on the ground floor. No way they’re going to cover thirty-something flights of stairs in time to catch me. Which gives me a head start. I can’t go through the lobby, police will be either here or close by. I hit the button for the pool, on the third floor, and figure I can improvise.

It’s only now I realize I’m not alone; there’s an old man in the elevator wearing khakis and a polo, with sunglasses and a bucket hat on his head. White, definitely American, with that kind of terrified wonder you see in people from the Midwest. I’m still carrying the gun, and the oversize jacket I stole isn’t hiding the blood as much as I’d hoped.

I tuck the gun in the back of my waistband. I want to say something to him but I have no idea what. I think back to what Ravi said. The idea was to be invisible. People will see your face; let them forget it. One of the many reasons I was picked, he said, was the fact that there’s nothing particularly remarkable about me.

Average-looking white guy.

Still, should I kill this guy? Cameras are still out. I could.

But that doesn’t seem fair.

“Give me your wallet,” I tell him.

He fumbles for it and passes it over. I pull out the license. Franklin Reynolds, with an address in Kansas City. I hand him his license and pull a wad of cash out of my pocket, then gesture to his ring. “Go to the bar. Have a drink. Don’t volunteer to talk to the police. If they talk to you, you didn’t get a good look at me. Don’t even tell your wife about this. You understand, Kansas City?”

He nods. The doors open and I step off into an empty hallway. I hustle to the men’s locker room, the pool visible through floor-to-ceiling windows on an outdoor deck. There are people changing in the locker room, but nobody looks up, everyone more concerned with their own modesty. I grab a complimentary bathrobe, strip down to my boxers, and shove my soiled clothes into a garbage can. Then I go to the sink and make use of the free toiletries, wiping off as much blood as I can.

The guys protecting Campbell are bottlenecked. And anyway, they don’t give a damn about him. He was a job and now the job is off. They’ll be looking to scramble for the shadows, not get revenge.

The locks in here are all cheap and flimsy. I manage to work through three until I find a change of clothes that fit, and I’m just pulling on a pair of slightly-too-tight jeans when the door opens and a Chinese man walks in wearing a black suit. He juts out his chin and raises his voice to be heard throughout the space. “Everyone, there’s been an emergency. We need to ask you to evacuate the building for a few moments.” He repeats it in Mandarin and then Tamil.

I join the men streaming out of the locker room, eyes on the ground, and stroll calmly toward the elevators.

—

With nightfall comes relief from the choking humidity. My stolen jeans don’t feel so oppressive, and there’s even a nice breeze coming off the bay.

The stone steps leading down to the water are filled with tourists milling about under a darkened sky, waiting for something to start. It’s just dark enough that my injuries aren’t as apparent, so I’m less worried about hiding my face. My body is creaking and groaning like a piece of farm equipment left in the rain. I can barely raise my arm above my shoulder. Despite this, I’m still a little high after mainlining that much adrenaline. Ready to go another few rounds if necessary. I weave through the crowd, bouncing on my toes, looking for Ravi.

It doesn’t take long to find him, leaning against a railing, away from the crowd. He’s wearing a white polo shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals. He’s scruffy and his black wavy hair, shot through with the odd strand of gray, is stylishly unkempt. His outfit makes him look like a dad, but his sharp features and sly grin make him look like the kind of dad who hits on his kid’s second-grade teacher. He looks out over the bay like he looked at me when we first met, like he looks at the entire world: everything is a spreadsheet. Just data to process and put in its place.

I lean on the metal railing next to him. He looks me up and down, and for a fleeting moment his eyes widen. He tries to distract me from that by holding a brown paper bag toward me. Inside are deep-fried dough balls.

“I got a dairy thing,” I tell him.

“They have milk powder in them, but they’re cooked. Can you have milk products that are cooked?”

The answer is usually yes but sometimes no. Whatever, I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I’ll pick up some Lactaid just in case. I pluck one out. It’s sticky and smells like a rose. I shove the whole thing in my mouth. It’s so sweet my teeth ache, but that might be trauma from earlier.

Did I get hit in the face? Maybe I got hit in the face. I don’t remember.

The city’s skyline glitters across the bay, the buildings tall and almost leaning toward us, a rainbow of colors giving off Blade Runner vibes. We’re just far enough from the rest of the crowd that we can’t be heard, but he speaks low anyway.

“You’re alive,” he says, his voice as flat and as calm as the dark water stretching out below us.

“You seem disappointed.”

He doesn’t say anything to that.

“What are these?” I ask, reaching out to take another dough ball.

“Gulab jamun,” he says. “They’re all over the place in Little India.”

“Your intel sucked,” I tell him, chewing slowly. “There were six men in the room, plus Campbell.”

He shrugs, takes out a ball, examines it closely, and takes a small bite. “Earlier in the day it was eight. There was some scuttle about an attempt on his life, so they circled up.”

The way he says it, completely unperturbed, makes me want to slap him. “You couldn’t share that?”

Ravi takes another small bite.

“So it was a test,” I tell him.

He offers me a little side-eye and a smirk. “And you passed.”

“Bullshit,” I tell him, a little too loud, then look over my shoulder to make sure no one is close enough to hear. “I could have gotten killed.”

“We thought you might die, or at least get arrested, at which point you would have been dead before you saw the inside of a cell,” Ravi says. “That was the interview. And this is the job. The stakes can be anything from a pile of money to the end of the world, and the only requirement is that you’re the best. The fact that you’re standing here tells me you’ll do just fine.”

I take two dough balls at once and shove them in my mouth. Think back to three months ago, getting pulled into a blank room at Coronado, Ravi sitting at a table, regarding me like color-coded cells on a computer screen, trying to figure what they added up to, his hand on a folder in front of him that he never opened.

He told me he worked for an organization called the Agency. I asked if he meant the CIA, and he told me, no, the CIA was peewee football and he was with the NFL. The best I can tell, it’s some deep-state shit—a clandestine group made up of various government agencies and financial and industrial leaders, all with a goal of keeping the planet spinning the right way.

“I’m impressed,” he says now, throwing away the now-empty bag in a trash bin next to him, and taking a wet wipe out of his pocket to clean his fingers while I suck mine clean. “For every seven people we recruit, one makes it. The first assignment usually isn’t so hard—generally you at least get a gun. But the fact that you went in there unarmed?” He looks me up and down again. “Impressive. Really impressive.”

He’s trying to flatter me.

As much as it annoys me, it also works. I didn’t join the SEALs thinking I’d be using my words. And what I did today, that’s not something just anyone can do.

“Why me?” I ask.

It’s the question I’d held back until now, but it feels important.

“No family, no real ties to civilian life,” Ravi says. “High test scores, glowing recommendations. You have an ear for languages. You have the right temperament. Plus the military is full of militia nuts who sleep with their AR-15s, or guys who have a pair of plastic nuts on the back of their pickup truck. You’re neither of those things. We have some other metrics, but ultimately, you were exactly what we look for.”

“And how am I supposed to trust you?” I ask.

Before Ravi can respond, the sound of delicate, haunting Chinese string instruments swells up from unseen speakers, and the water in the bay explodes into towers of mist that are filled with tendrils of neon light, shifting into shapes like flowers and mandalas. They grow larger and get closer until there’s condensation on my face. The crowd oohs and aahs.

It’s beautiful, but hard for me to appreciate.

Ravi takes off his glasses and cleans them on his polo. “You’re not supposed to trust me. You’re just supposed to help me keep the world running.”

He replaces his glasses and offers me his hand.

I think about becoming an astronaut.

I think about the man I killed on the balcony—the crunch of delicate things shredding in his neck and the way his body went limp when his soul left.

I think about how good it felt to jump from a tall building and be saved by my wits.

I think about how good it feels to be good at something.

I think about mainlining adrenaline for a living.

And I shake Ravi’s hand.

“You need a handle,” he says.

“What, like a nickname?”

“You need it from an operational standpoint,” he says. “But as time goes on, that name will serve as a deterrent. Something that’ll shut down certain situations without you having to raise a hand.”

“I’ll leave that to you,” I tell him. “Feels like an asshole move, naming myself.”

Flashbacks to grade school, seeing Predator for the first time and thinking that maybe if I had a cool nickname like Dutch, I wouldn’t get bullied.

It didn’t work.

Ravi gazes at the water, at the neon shapes shifting in the mist. “?‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death.’?” He smiles, satisfied with himself. “I’ve been wanting to use that one for a while. But like I said, one in seven. Okay, Pale Horse.” He slaps his hand on my shoulder and leaves it there, giving it a squeeze. “Hezbollah won’t want any fingerprints on this. To them, this never happened, so no one’s looking for you. There’s a flight booked home for you tomorrow night under the name you flew in on. In the meantime, visit the food markets. The Maxwell Food Centre on Kadayanallur Street is my favorite. Get some chicken rice. Some char kway teow. Enjoy yourself.”

He removes his hand and, without another word, leaves me there. I watch him move through the crowd, multicolored lights illuminating his white polo, and then he’s gone. I turn back to the bay, watch the water and the light dance and grow bigger, forming greater and more complicated shapes as the music hits a crescendo.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death.

I’m not a Bible guy but I know how that verse ends. Johnny Cash’s gravel voice sings it in my ear.

And hell followed with him.

The music stops. The lights go out. Water rains back into the bay, and the crowd is enveloped by darkness.