Germ

Litt pressed the handset tighter to his face. "You mean before I expose you, before I shatter whatever legacy you think you've built?"

"I mean before you do something you'll regret."

"The only thing I regret is ever trusting you."

"I know you're close to something, Karl. Word is, you've stopped taking orders for bioterrorism products. It's not because you've won the lottery, so I figure you've got your crew working on something else, something big enough to forgo cash flow. That tells me you're confident in whatever it is, and you're close to rolling it out. One of your scientists defected. I'm guessing he had an attack of conscience. That—and the very nature of the work you do—tells me that what you have in mind is very nasty."

He sighed into the phone, a raspy gasp that turned Litt's stomach.

"Listen to me. Maybe you're right, maybe I care only about myself, maybe I've always been that way. But that's not you, Karl. I've seen your capacity to love. Has your heart really hardened so much?"

"Yes." A cold, solid syllable.

"I'm trying to tell you: You don't have to do what you're planning. We can work something out."

"I've worked it out, and you're too late."

"What?" Kendrick said. "What have you done?"

"You'll find out soon enough."

"If that's true, why did you hire killers?"

Litt laughed. "You know as well as I do, for every exposed secret, ten new ones need protecting. Now, more than ever, I need my privacy."

"Since you've played your hand?"

"You can say I waited for a royal flush."

"Did you get everything back?"

He's fishing, Litt thought. "I'm short one biologist."

"Another one?"

"No, the same one. He was a good man."

"Apparently too good for you."

"Good-bye, Kendrick."

"Karl."

Litt hung up. Kendrick was difficult to read. For him, the day's events could be over . . . or he was still investigating, seeing what was there to find . . . or he had the chip. Litt didn't put much stock in this last possibility. He believed Kendrick would have hinted that the game was over, that after all the battles he'd lost, he'd won the war. More likely, he would continue to poke around, maybe find Despesorio's trail or something he'd left behind. Litt hoped Atropos was as good as his reputation.

"Soon it won't matter," he said out loud. "Old man, you're about to find out how just how rock-hard my heart has become."

Kendrick disconnected and sat in his wheelchair, staring

at the phone. One hand picked at the wool blanket covering his legs. His other hand went to his mouth. He snipped off a sliver of finger-nail between his teeth and examined the result. God was gazing at him, and he shifted his eyes to gaze back. Nestled in a felt-lined cup holder in the arm of his chair, a God-head pipe cast a disapproving look on Kendrick's agitation.

"I know," he whispered at the face, "but it's him, not me. What choice do I have?"

Kendrick had first beheld the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1958, when he attended the funeral mass of Pius XII as Eisenhower's secretary of state. The potency of Michelangelo's brush had stunned him: the luster of Ezekiel's garments, evil Haman's dramatic crucifixion, the rising saints and tortured sinners of The Last Judgment; all of it rendered among intricate columns and arches and pedestals that the artist had painted on the ceiling's smooth plane. But nothing took his breath away like the visage of God as He was creating Adam. Its combination of strong features and tender expression portrayed the perfect balance of power and compassion, superiority and love.

Back in the States, he found himself pondering that sweeping beard of Michelangelo's God, the granite nose and forehead, the purposeful eyes. In God's face, Kendrick discovered the potential of man, the symbol of the way he wanted to live out the rest of his life. He secured the finest raw meerschaum Eskisehir had to offer—this was three years before the Turkish government banned the export of meerschaum block—and sent it to the most renowned Viennese carver. What he received back was a three-inch-tall, three-dimensional carving in white meerschaum clay. It matched the Sistine head of God right down to the bulging vein in His temple, the arch of concentration in His brow, the way His beard rose up the jawline only to the earlobe. It was a masterpiece of a masterpiece.

It was also a pipe, with an amber stem curving up from the back of the head and a bowl whittled into the crown. Over the years, the meerschaum had absorbed nicotine from countless bowls of tobacco, coloring and highlighting the creases of God's face in a cinnamon glow. It was aging much more gracefully than Kendrick's own craggy countenance.