my ears, and with my finger I pushed ever so slightly at the plastic cap on the syringe.
Yes, bow out of their contradictions and their traps and their lies, and their endless capacity to use you. Defeat them. Come now.
"Come now?" I whispered. The words separated themselves from the theme of rage that was common to my mind. Why had I thought that,Come now?
"You didn't think it," said the stranger. "Don't you see he's doing his damnedest to defeat both of us? Leave the syringe alone."
He looked young and eager, and almost irresistibly affectionate as he stared at me, but there was nothing young about him, and the sunlight was spilling in on him beautifully, and everything about him was effortlessly attractive. Only now did I notice, a little frantically, that he wore a simple gray suit, and a very beautiful blue silk tie.
Nothing about this was remarkable, but his face and hands were remarkable. And the expression was inviting and forgiving.
Forgiving.
Why would someone, anyone, look that way at me? Yet I had the feeling that he knew me, knew me better than I knew myself. It was as if he knew all about me, and only now did it penetrate that he had three times called me by my name.
Surely that was because The Right Man had sent him. Surely that was because I had been double- crossed. This was the last job for me with The Right Man, and here was the superior assassin who could put an end to an old assassin who was now more of a mystery than he was worth.
Then cheat them, and do it now.
"I do know you," said the stranger. "I've known you all your life. And I'm not from The Right Man." At this he softly laughed. "Well, not The Right Man you hold in such regard, Lucky, but from another whois The Right Man, I should say."
"What do you want?"
"For you to come with me out of here. For you to turn a deaf ear to the voice that's plaguing you. You've listened to that voice long enough."
I calculated. What could explain all this? Not merely the stress of being in my room at the Mission Inn, no, that wasn't sufficient. It must have been the poison, that I'd absorbed some of it when preparing it, that in spite of the double gloves, I hadn't done things exactly right.
"You're too clever for that," said the stranger.
And so you devolve into madness? When you have the power to turn your back on them all?
I looked about me. I looked at the tester bed; I looked at the familiar dark brown draperies. I looked at the huge fireplace, now directly behind the stranger. I looked at all the common furnishings and objects of the room that I so well knew. How could madness project itself so sharply? How could it create such a specific illusion? But surely this figure wasn't there, and I wasn't talking to him, and the warm, inviting look on his face was some device of my own wretched mind.
He laughed again very softly. But the other voice was working.
Don't give him a chance to get that syringe away from you. If you won't die in this room, damn you, then step outside. Find some corner of this hotel, and you know all of them, and there put an end to yourself once and for all.
For one precious second, I was certain this figure would vanish if I moved towards him. I did it. He was as solid and palpable as before. He stepped back for me, and gestured that I might go out before him.
And suddenly I found myself standing on the veranda, in the sunlight, and the colors around me were wondrously vivid and lulling and I felt no urgency whatsoever, no ticking of any clock.
I heard him close the door of the suite and then I looked at him as he stood beside me.
"Don't talk to me," I said crossly. "I don't know who you are or what you want or where you came from."
"You called me," he said in his even and agreeable voice. "You've called me in the past, but never so desperately as you called me now."
Again I had that sensation of love flowing from him, of an infinite knowledge and an unaccountable acceptance of who and what I was.
"Called you?"
"You prayed, Lucky. You prayed to your guardian angel, and your guardian angel relayed the prayer to me."
There was simply no way in