Gagging and choking, Khalid flopped over onto his right side, felt a sharp stab of pain in the center of his chest, and knew at once that several of his ribs had been shattered. Then he realized through his pain that the jeep’s lights had continued to shine on him, pinning him in their beams. The right headlamp dim with its film of snow. The one he’d cleared off harsh and blindingly bright. He somehow managed to prop himself up on his elbow, tried dragging himself through the snow out of its direct glare.
But again Khalid was given no time to move even an inch. His eyes wide, his mouth yawping with shock, he saw Yousaf stop the vehicle, shift into reverse, come to another momentary stop, and then charge rapidly toward him again.
The jeep rolled over Khalid at full speed, crushing him into the ground, its wheels dragging his limp, mangled body along for almost two minutes before finally leaving it behind in a heap of churned and bloodied snow.
Yousaf did not bother to look back. His face set with determination, he plunged on alone through the storm-tossed darkness, bearing his precious cargo to those who awaited it across the furthermost borders of night and nation.
Roger Gordian studied the pile of rocks in front of his wheelbarrow, saw one he liked for the course he’d been laying on his stone wall, picked it up with a grunt of mild exertion, and then placed it atop the last two rocks he’d stacked. Nice, he thought. A beaut, in fact. Shifting it around for the best fit, Gordian pressed down on it with his hand, noticed it wasn’t quite balanced, readjusted it, pressed down again, felt it wobble some more, made another unsuccessful readjustment, scratched his chin, and knelt to investigate.
Ahh, he thought with a nod. Elementary.
From his crouched position Gordian could see a gap between his latest addition to the wall and its two underlying stones. He poked his finger into it, discovered it went in all the way to the middle knuckle. What he would need to do here was fill that hole.
He got to his feet, studied the rock pile for something the right size, didn’t see any likely candidates, and hunted around in the grass for a minute. Then a little chunk of quartz caught his eye from a nearby patch of grass and he went on over for a closer look.
Above him at the crest of the hill that sloped down in landscaped terraces from the verandah of their Palo Alto home, Ashley stood watering her hillside plants with a garden hose, sweeping it from side to side, leaving transitory rainbows in the air as sunlight passed through the fine mist around its nozzle. A year earlier they’d spent thousands for an underground sprinkler system after Ash had decided that using the hose was ridiculously obsolete. For a while she’d given the newly installed system unqualified raves, preached the gospel of liberation from the endless dragging and snagging of hoses, and talked repeatedly about donating the evil rubber serpent — and its various carriers, extensions, and attachments — to a Goodwill shop she supported in town.
Then she’d had a spontaneous reversal of faith. Or at least it had seemed spontaneous to Gordian. Maybe she’d contemplated it long and hard in private. All he knew for certain was that Ashley had stalked in from the garden one day, complained the sprinklers weren’t reaching anything close to all her “spots,” and gotten the old hose out of the shed where it had languished for months — unused but surprisingly undonated. Sprinkler systems, she’d declared to him, were at best secondary aids to dedicated keepers of the green, and, at their worst, excuses for the lazy and slothful to shirk their gardening responsibilities.
Gordian hadn’t personally noticed a significant difference between Ash’s pre-sprinkler and post-sprinkler hillside plants. They had always looked beautiful and well-tended to him. But then, he accepted that she had superior garden aesthetics. Just as it went without question in their household — well, mostly — that he was the better builder.
Gordian plucked the stone he’d spotted from its grassy nest and inspected it in his palm. It was about four inches wide and somewhat wedge-shaped… just what the wall-doctor ordered.
Now he brought his new find back to the wall, worked it partway into the gap with his fingertips, took a hammer from his tool belt, and carefully chinked the stone into place. Then he gave the large rock he’d been trying to stabilize another test.
It sat steadily on the two supporting rocks beneath it.
Okay, he thought. Very nifty.
Gordian stood admiring the wall for a bit. There was still a lot of work ahead of him before it was finished. Two weeks’ worth, maybe three. But he thought he’d gotten the hang of how to make the stones hold together, and always took satisfaction from figuring out how things worked. Simple things, complicated things, they were all enjoyable to him.
But tell me… are they comparable? an inner voice asked. Not equally, mind you. I’ve cut you some slack there and didn’t use that particular word. What I want is your overall feeling of how one stacks up against the other — excuse the pun.
Gordian frowned at the nagging voice in his head. It didn’t speak up too often, but when it did, it was with the leery, contentious tone of an attorney cross-examining a reluctant witness on the stand, always using the old courtroom tactic of never asking a question whose answer you didn’t already know. It would not, however, be necessary to put Gordian under solemn oath to gain an admission that his backyard stonewalling didn’t approach — never mind equal, counselor — the challenge of turning the failed electronics firm he’d bought at a bargain-basement price into a technological giant, or designing the GAPSFREE avionic suite that had revolutionized the U.S. military’s recon and target acquisition capabilities to earn him his wealth and reputation. Nor did it quite impart the satisfaction he’d gotten from taking great strides toward the creation of a truly global telecommunications web. But Gordian had given ten years of his life to service in the Air Force, better than double that many to UpLink. The next chunk of it belonged to the wife and family that had sacrificed so much to his dream of a world made freer by the open spread of information… and he meant to share it with them with the same passion he’d devoted to his professional and public occupations. While it seemed he’d taken sail on his sixtieth birthday only yesterday, the line of that rear horizon was further away in fact than in his mind. Why keep looking back through a telescope to measure himself against his own past achievements? Gordian didn’t know. Still, he sometimes had trouble steering away from making comparisons. And maybe, counselor, just maybe, the greatest challenge every man faced as he grew old was trying to recognize how pointless it was to compete with the younger man he’d been.
Gordian couldn’t have begun to guess why this train of thought abruptly made him remember that he owed Lenny Reisenberg a phone call, but something in it did, and he paused as he was about to lift another rock from the pile to dial Lenny’s office on his cellular.
“Boss!” Lenny said when the receptionist transferred the call. “I was hoping you’d buzz me. Wasn’t sure if I should give things a little while longer—”
“I figured, Len,” Gordian said. “And I apologize for not getting back to you sooner.”
“Busy soaking up the joys of retirement?”
“So to speak,” Gordian said. “I have to admit, though, there are moments when I feel out of my element. Like I’m playing hooky from school, I suppose.”