offstetler tilts toward Strickland’s desk. He’s holding the syringe inside his pocket. Mihalkov will never find out. He’ll never need to know. Half the solution for Strickland. Half for the Devonian. The first needs to be killed to ensure the second can be killed cleanly. Hoffstetler tells himself that the wicked, hateful mudak deserves it. The glass of the syringe is oily, slipping from his grip. He wipes his fingers on the inside of his pocket, takes a drier hold. He’s nearly to the desk. Don’t stop moving.

“Go back and knock first,” Strickland says.

They are senseless words, and Hoffstetler, his brain hardwired for sense, rejects it like a computer fed defective data, and does the worst thing, he stops moving, right in front of a wall of monitors that blind him with sixteen screens of gray light. He raises a hand to shield his eyes, the hand that, one second ago, had held the syringe. It’s empty now, a soft, flabby, harmless thing.

“Knock…?”

“Protocol, Bob,” Strickland says. “I know how you value protocol.”

“I wanted … to give you one more chance…”

“Me? Give me? Bob, I don’t follow. You’re free to tell me about it, of course. Just go back to the door and knock first.”