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his own. So far both Aunt Eileen and I had partially overridden them. Still, challenging him at this stage of the game struck me as too risky. I liked the idea of giving him a link back to me even less. I therefore needed to get my mind off him. As a symbolic action, what the Agency calls Conscious Evasion Procedure, I sent the scribbles through my cross-cut shredder.
    Night came early this time of year. Even though I twitched at the thought of Johnson hunting me on dark streets, I refused to spend the night sleeping on the office floor. I locked up the suite, then took the N Judah streetcar home. Safety in numbers—as always at rush hour, commuters crammed the car. I stood all the way to Ninth Avenue, my stop, did a little grocery shopping, then hurried up the stairs to my apartment before my landlady realized I’d come home. Mrs. Zukovski loved long conversations on the stairs, or to be precise, long monologues, usually about her cats.
    Before I locked the door behind me, I did a quick mental scan of the apartment: all clear. Nathan had his ways of securing a place. I had mine. Glare from the streetlight outside fell through the bay window onto my saggy blue couch and the book-littered coffee table. I switched on the overhead light. From the door I could see into the tiny kitchen with its black and white tile; it lay in shadow, but the shadow came through the side window from the building next door, not occult forces, or as the Agency prefers to call them, Unexploited Personnel Capabilities. I put the salad fixings away, then decided to wait for dinner.
    My home computer connected to a scrambled DSL line, not a business wireless setup like we had in the office. On top of the scrambler, the Agency double-encrypts all files with a private system. We call our site TranceWeb because you need to go into trance to read it, which effectively limits snoopers. I logged on, grabbed the Nathan file, and let myself drift into the proper frame of mind.
    What I read made a lot of things clear. His parents were middle-class Jews in London who came under the influence of a New-Age type “spiritual practices rabbi.” Although no one seemed to know exactly which powers this “New Ezekiel” had, he must have developed the ability to talk people out of their hard-earned money. This supposed spiritual leader acquired a lot of land in Israel in the 1970s and decided to found a kibbutz. He told his followers that he wanted to revive the old Zionist days before Palestine became Israel, a time of hard work and simple living, but also of pure communal goals and ideals, a collective farm in the best sense.
    Unfortunately, he was somewhat less than sane. His actual goal turned out to be a kibbutz dedicated as a training center for Armageddon. The men studied weaponry, ready to fight on the side of the Messiah, while the women went off into the desert to have visions. They were hoping to learn who this Messiah was and when they should get dinner ready for his arrival.
    After seven years Nathan’s mother had had a vision. She’d seen that she’d married the wrong man. After the divorce, she headed back to London with a new lover. Every summer Nathan visited his mother in the U.K. for six weeks, which explained his good but oddly formal English. Nathan’s father stuck it out on the kibbutz for a year, then took his son and went to Tel Aviv and that job in the insurance business.
    In Tel Aviv Nathan had a normal life, if you can consider a ten-year-old boy who knows how to clean, load, and fire every handheld weapon known to modern man normal. He’d done very well during his compulsory stint in the army. Way ahead of his class, I figured, judging from the number of sharpshooter medals that studded his public record.
    When he left the army, Interpol recruited him because, according to the file, he had an unusual flair for languages as well as guns. Yet he left there after two years, apparently or maybe. They no longer listed him on any official