iles recoils from the knuckles against his window. The guard makes a cranking motion with his hand. Giles doesn’t know what to do but obey. He rolls down the window, and the guard’s features come into sharp definition: sleepy brown eyes, unkempt mustache, hairy ears. He frowns as he runs the light over Giles’s clothing, and Giles is jolted by memory: Twenty-two years ago, the night of the arrest at the gay bar that got him booted from Klein & Saunders, all those mustached cops and how their flashlight beams across his body felt like assault.

“You don’t look like Laundry,” the guard says.

“Thanks.” This is how a driver would talk, Giles thinks, not thank you, good sir.

The guard doesn’t appreciate the joke. “ID?”

Giles grins so hugely he believes teeth might start dropping from his jaws and pretends to search for his wallet, hoping the guard, cold and tired, will tell him to forget it. There is silence from the guard; Giles has no choice but to produce the ID. He holds it so the guard can read it without touching, but it doesn’t work. With viperous speed, the guard, not so drowsy after all, plucks it. The flashlight turns the ID’s papery stock translucent. Giles can see right through it as the guard scratches it with his thumbnail. The 7 Giles had inked to advance Michael Parker’s age comes off.

“Oops,” Giles says.

“Out of the van,” the guard says.

Then all the lights at Occam Aerospace Research Center go out.