Tom Schranger turned stiffly and shook hands with Marianne White as she stood there looking forlorn and bewildered, in a state of shock one might have almost said, the dove-gray London fog flapping about her slim ankles. She was still a beautiful woman. He relented -- he leaned in and kissed one cheek, then turned her face with his folded newspaper and kissed the other. Marianne's cheeks were as soft as he remembered. Her lips opened slightly as he kissed her, their hot faces brushing electrically. Even at the age of forty she'd been like a ripe peach, a redheaded peach. Loose strands of her beautiful hair whipped about his face in a sudden cold wind gust. He reflected that she would probably be dead in six months. If Kap had scrambled his way through a sewer tunnel out of the doomed Facility, he'd eventually come for his old colleague. The man's file said that he was obsessed with honor, believed in people keeping their sworn word, and never let go of a grudge until the offending party had been terminated. Even if Kap was in fact dead, or was killed before he could wreak any more havoc, then the Agency would still probably retire Marianne for her initial small errors in judgement that had allowed this escalating goat-fuck to grow to such monstrous and noisy proportions, threatening lavish salaries and self-important reputations. Was it pity he felt? Ah. Yes it was! Pity and a trace of infatuation. What a devil she'd been in the sack. It was too bad her ticket was now punched by this Ultra business. He walked away. She stood there with her hands thrust in her overcoat pockets, watching him go. He glanced once over his shoulder and raised two fingers in a fond, yet clipped farewell. She smiled alluringly. What a pity, and what a pathetic, raging mess Ultra had turned into. He gnawed his own lips all the way to the office. He could still taste the beautiful Marianne on them. Mark Kap had tasted some of that, too. Once he'd shut the door to his "cell," as he called it -- for it was almost as bare as a monk's cell, though it had a window overlooking the Mall -- Tom began to feel better. He settled into his swivel desk chair and picked up Mark Kap's dossier from his desk. It was a thick blue folder containing every relevant bit of information about Mark Kap, mixed in with much irrelevant trivia and gossip. It had been stamped CLASSIFIED - TOP SECRET - DO NOT COPY. He leafed through the pages. There were ten typed sheets describing Kap's baptism by fire as an agent in Sarajevo. It was in that doomed city, amidst the crackling of small arms fire and the dull thump of explosions, that he'd first conceived of the idea of using children as trained killers. This brainstorm had come to him, apparently, when he'd come into contact with a teenaged Bosnian Muslim orphan who had joined the Bosnian militia and transformed, scarcely losing a beat, from a pathetic waif into a lethal and ruthless sniper. On returning Stateside Kap had consulted with a number of psychological experts on the emotional and moral development of children, and they'd confirmed for him what he'd observed in the Bosnian sniper-waif -- e.g. young human beings, if gotten hold of, isolated from "normal life," and trained thoroughly and relentlessly before the age of 14, made ideal killers, and could continue to function as such well into their twenties.