The elevator stopped and swayed slackly while the doors clattered open. He stepped out on the top floor of offices, turned left, and pushed open the heavy NO ADMITTANCE fire door leading to a stairwell. Sitting on the dank cement stairs, his toolbox beside him, was a huge Negro workman in coveralls. Jonathan nodded and stepped past him up the steps. One flight up, the stairs came to an end, and he pressed out through another fire door to what had been the loft of the building before CII had installed a suite of offices there. The smell of hospital, so sharply remembered, filled the hallway where an overblown cleaning woman slowly swung a mop back and forth over the same spot. On a bench to one side of a door bearing: "Yurasis Dragon: Consulting Service," sat a beefy man in a business suit, his briefcase in his lap. The man rose to face Jonathan, who resented being touched by these people. All of them, the Negro worker, the cleaning woman, the businessman, were CII guards; and the toolbox, the mop handle, and the briefcase all contained weapons.

Jonathan stood with his legs apart, his hands against the wall, embarrassed and annoyed with himself for being embarrassed, while the businessman's professional hands frisked part of his body and clothing.

"This is new," the businessman said, taking a pen from Jonathan's pocket. "You usually carry one of French make—dark green and gold."

"I lost it."

"I see. Does this have ink in it?"

"It's a pen."

"I'm sorry. I'll either have to keep it for you until you come out, or I can check it out. If I check it out, you'll lose the ink."

"Why don't you just keep it for me."

The businessman stepped aside and allowed Jonathan to enter the office.

"You are eighteen minutes late, Hemlock," Mrs. Cerberus accused as soon as he had closed the door behind him.

"Thereabouts." Jonathan was assailed by the overwhelming hospital smell of the glistening outer office. Mrs. Cerberus was squat and muscular in her starched white nurse's uniform, her coarse gray hair cropped short, her cold eyes pinched into slits by pouches of fat, her sandpaper skin appearing to have been scrubbed daily with sal soda and a currycomb, her thin upper lip aggressively mustachioed.

"You're looking inviting today, Mrs. Cerberus."

"Mr. Dragon does not like to be kept waiting," she snarled.

"Who among us really does?"

"Are you healthy?" she asked without solicitude.

"Reasonably."

"No cold? No known contact with infection?"

"Just the usual lot: pellagra, syphilis, elephantiasis."

She glared at him. "All right, go in." She pressed a button that unlocked the door behind her, then returned to the papers on her desk, not dealing with Jonathan further.

He stepped into the interlock chamber; the door clanged shut behind him; and he stood in the dim red light Mr. Dragon provided as a mezzo-phase from the glittering white of the outer office to the total dark of his own. Jonathan knew he would adapt to the dark more quickly if he closed his eyes. At the same time, he slipped out of his suit coat. The temperature in the interlock and in Mr. Dragon's office was maintained at a constant 87°. The slightest chill, the briefest contact with cold or flu virus would incapacitate Mr. Dragon for months. He had almost no natural resistance to disease.

The door to Mr. Dragon's office clicked and swung open automatically when the cooler air Jonathan had introduced into the interlock had been heated to 87°.

"Come in, Hemlock," Mr. Dragon's metallic voice invited from the darkness beyond.

Jonathan put out his hands and felt his way forward toward a large leather chair he knew to be opposite Mr. Dragon's desk.

"A little to the left, Hemlock."

As he sat, he could dimly make out the sleeve of his white shirt. His eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to the dark.

"Now then. How have you been these past months?"

"Rhetorical."

Dragon laughed his three dry, precise ha's. "True enough. We have been keeping a protective eye on you. I am informed that there is a painting on the black market that has taken your fancy."

"Yes. A Pissarro."

"And so you need money. Ten thousand dollars, if I am not misinformed. A bit dear for personal titillation."

"The painting is priceless."

"Nothing is priceless, Hemlock. The price of this painting will be the life of a man in Montreal. I have never understood your fascination with canvas and crusted pigment. You must instruct me one day."

"It's not a thing you can learn."

"Either you have it or you haven't, eh?"

"You either got it or you ain't."

Dragon sighed. "I guess one has to be born to the idiom." No accent, only a certain exactitude of diction betrayed Dragon's foreign birth. "Still, I must not deride your passion for collecting paintings. Without it, you would need money less often, and we would be deprived of your services." Very slowly, like a photograph in the bottom of a developing tray, the image of Mr. Dragon began to emerge through the dark as Jonathan's eyes dilated. He anticipated the revulsion he would experience.

"Don't let me waste too much of your time, Mr. Dragon."

"Meaning: let's get to the matter at hand." There was disappointment in Dragon's voice. He had taken a perverse liking to Jonathan and would have enjoyed chatting with someone from outside the closed world of international assassination. "Very well, then. One of our men—code call: Wormwood—was killed in Montreal. There were two assailants. Search Division has located one of them. You will sanction this man."

Jonathan smiled at the cryptic jargon of CII, in which "demote maximally" meant purge by killing, "biographic leverage" meant blackmail, "wet work" meant killing, and "sanction" meant counter-assassination. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and Dragon's face become dimly visible. The hair was white as silk thread, and kinky, like a sheep's. The features, floating in the retreating gloom, were arid alabaster. Dragon was one of nature's rarest genealogical phenomena: a total albino. This accounted for his sensitivity to light; his eyes and eyelids lacked protective pigment. He had also been born without the ability to produce white corpuscles in sufficient quantity. As a result, he had to be insulated from contact with people who might carry disease. It was also necessary that his blood be totally replaced by massive transfusions each six months. For the half century of his life, Dragon had lived in the dark, without people, and on the blood of others. This existence had not failed to affect his personality.

Jonathan looked at the face, awaiting the emergence of the most disgusting feature. "You say Search has located only oneof the targets?"

"They are working on the second one. It is my hope that they will have identified him by the time you arrive in Montreal."

"I won't take them both. You know that." Jonathan had made a moral bargain with himself to work for CII only when it was fiscally necessary. He had to be on his guard against sanction assignments being forced on him at other times.

"It may be necessary that you take both assignments, Hemlock."

"Forget it." Jonathan felt his hands grip the arms of his chair. Dragon's eyes were becoming visible. Totally without coloration, they were rabbit pink in the iris and blood red in the pupil. Jonathan glanced away in involuntary disgust.

Dragon was hurt. "Well, well, we shall talk about the second sanction when the time comes."

Dragon smiled thinly. "People seldom come to me with good news."

"This sanction is going to cost you twenty thousand."

"Twice your usual fee? Really, Hemlock!"

"I need ten thousand for the Pissarro. And ten for my house."

"I am not interested in your domestic economy. You need twenty thousand dollars. We normally pay ten thousand for a sanction. There are two sanctions involved here. It seems to work out well."