The door swings shut, but not fast enough. I stick the toe of my sneaker in, just barely, to keep it open. I wait three minutes to make sure the lawyer has gotten to her own office. Then I slip inside.

The lights are dim, the reception desk empty, the floors carpeted. I try to guess which way the lawyer has gone, decide it was to the left. I go right. Some individual offices are locked, others are wide open.

Their computers look pretty up-to-date, but I’m able to find one with a USB port. I enter the office and close the door behind me. There’s a nice view down California Street.

The computer’s password protected. I try the basics: 1,2,3,4. QWERTY. YTREWQ, which is querty backward. PASSWORD. A few others. Whoever uses this computer isn’t quite that dumb. They are, however, dumb enough to write it down in the corner of the desk blotter.

I check the clock, stick in the flash drive. It’s slow to load. Very slow, since there are a lot of hi-res images.

From here it will be simple. All I have to do is attach the file to a dozen e-mails: CNN, the New York Times, various members of Congress from both parties, contacts I know in the hacker collective Anonymous, the FBI.

I type the addresses in. Each will know the others have received the same documents, so there will be no chance of a cover-up.

All I have to do is push “send.”

All. I have to do.

Is push “send.”

What follows won’t happen overnight. The world doesn’t move that fast. But in days or weeks the FBI will descend on Terra Spiker.

Congress will schedule hearings.

Documents and files will be seized. In the end, likely, handcuffs will grind shut around the wrists of Terra and Tattooed Tommy and probably lots of others.

I sit, unmoving, staring at the screen.

A crime’s been committed. Many crimes. Some may be more than criminal; they may be evil.

But I can’t lie to myself and pretend that’s my only motive. I’m angry at Terra Spiker for the life she’s given me. For treating me like one of her low-level employees after my parents died. For keeping me, if not quite a prisoner, then close to it in the walled-off world of Spiker Biopharm.

For doing to me what she did to Eve.

“Do this,” I tell myself.

Chaos and madness. Unleash it. What’s that phrase?

Cry havoc?

I actually pause to Google it.

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” I read.

Then I read that “cry havoc” was a phrase from Shakespeare’s day, a signal to soldiers to burn and pillage and rape.

So, a bad choice of things to think about.

Shakespeare used the phrase in two other plays. He must have liked it. One is something about a stained field. Bloodstains, of course. The third is from a play I’ve never heard of.

“Do not cry havoc, where you should but hunt with modest warrant,” I read aloud.

I gaze at the words on the screen.

Seriously, Solo? You’re hesitating? You’ve lived for this moment.

Let slip the dogs of war!

Or …

Hunt with modest warrant.

Just theoretically, I ask myself, what would that mean, to hunt with modest warrant? What’s the step that isn’t quite dogs of war?

I’m agitated. I feel bouncy and twitchy all of a sudden. Frustrated, in more than one way.

Really, Solo? A Google search stops you?

A Google search and a kiss. That’s the truth of it. That’s what has me jumpy and indecisive and looking for an excuse to just not go all dogs of war.

I’m a warrior. I am a dog of war. I’ve spent years … and now the will drains out of me because of a kiss and a Shakespeare quote?

Well, not just the kiss. The rope descent, that was … Yep, breathing a little harder at the memory, and whatever that brings to mind (I know exactly what it brings to mind). Whatever that memory means to me, if I drop my finger on that “send” key, a memory is all it will ever be.

The problem is that I can feel her legs wrapped around me, and I can taste her lips, and I can imagine, and imagination is a damned tease, imagination will torture you, but knowing that doesn’t stop it. My imagination is off and running, running through places sweet and sweaty. And it’s not just that, not just the sweaty parts or even the sweet parts, it’s the feeling that my life is a laser beam that just encountered a mirror, that it’s being bent, a sudden turn, a wild veer, a turn, all of that stuff, all that feeling that whatever the hell I thought my life was, maybe it’s not. Maybe the whole story of Solo was just a way to get to this point, only the point is not the poisoned e-mail that rests half an inch below the index finger of my right hand, the point is something I never saw coming and surprise! the Solo story is not all what I thought it was.

Justice and revenge. Or Eve.

My hand flies back. As if I’d suddenly discovered the keyboard was a cherry-red stovetop.

I gasp.

I stare at my hand. My hand made the decision. My hand thinks I’m an idiot. My hand thinks only a damned fool would choose revenge over love.

I think my hand may be right.

One way or the other, the decision isn’t mine to make alone. I need Eve.

– 35 –

“Evening,” he says again.

I nod. Too vigorously. Because my voice is sure to fail.

He’s here.

But he can’t be here.

He’s real.

But he can’t be real.

He’s taller, somehow, in reality. His eyes are alive now, amazingly alive. He’s curious, concerned. He knows me—that much I can tell. He knows who I am.