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on about their silly days, unaware of beings like
     me.
    Or at least not believing in their wildest nightmares that someone like me could still live among them.
    Unexposed.
    Unrecorded.
    Still hunting.
    With all that in mind, I am very, very cool as I drive an unmarked white panel van—one of a small fleet of vehicles I’ve collected
     over the years—through the rainy Berlin streets, past the scars of Hitler, and the Russians, and the Wall, way out to a forest
     north of Ahrensfelde, and down a wet wooded lane to a children’s camp on Liepnitz Lake not far from the sleepy village of
     Ützdorf.
    Do you know Ützdorf?
    It doesn’t matter.
    Just understand that there is no one at that camp today. At least that’s how it appears at first glance. Then again, why would
     there be? It’s pouring out and cold and there’s dense fog building out on the water around the island.
    I park near the dock. No sooner do I shut off the engine than my young genius friend appears on the porch of the boathouse.
    He’s bearded, midtwenties, and his soaking-wet hair hangs on his fogged glasses. He takes them off and tries to dry them on
     a wet sweatshirt that features the emblem of the Berlin Technical University.
    I take a gym bag from the passenger seat of my van and climb out, leaving the engine running.
    “How did you get here?” I ask, climbing up onto the porch, out of the rain.
    “Bus and walked, like you said. I got fucking soaked.”
    “Ever heard of a raincoat?” I ask.
    “Wasn’t raining when I started,” he says, irritated. “You have the money?”
    I hold up the bag. “Twenty-five thousand euros, as agreed.”
    “Let me see,” my friend says, reaching for the bag.
    I keep it just out of his reach. “Not before I see what I’m buying.”
    He looks pissed off, but he goes to a hiker’s pack against the boathouse wall. He retrieves a disk and hands it to me, saying,
     “All of Schneider’s work files.”
    “Did you look at them?” I ask in a super relaxed manner.
    “That would be against my ethics,” he replies.
    But his body language says otherwise.
    Once he hands me the disk, I play along and give him the bag of money.
    He opens it and checks several packets of fifty-euro notes.
    “Nice doing business with you,” he says, zipping the bag up.
    “Yes,” I say, pocketing the disk and finding the handle end of a flat-head screwdriver. “Need a lift to the bus stop?”
    “That would be great,” he says, turning back toward his knapsack.
    I take two quick steps behind him, grab his hair, and drive the sharpened blade of the screwdriver up under the nape of his
     skull.

CHAPTER 8
    MY YOUNG GENIUS friend never has the chance to scream.
    But as the blade finds the soft spot where spinal column becomes brain, his entire body goes electric and herky-jerky.
    When at last he drops my money and sags against me, I’m panting, spent and rubber-legged, as if I’ve just had the most explosive
     sex imaginable.
    What a thrill! What an amazing, amazing thrill!
    Even after all these years that rush never gets old.
    I stand there for several moments in the aftermath of a great death, calm, drained, sated, and yet hyperaware of everything
     around me: the rain, the clouds, the forest, and the whistling of ducks out there in the fog.
    With his body in my hands, with the sense of his life force still vibrating in me, it’s like I’m here and not, hovering on
     the edge of the afterlife, you know?
    At last I roll him over on his belly and draw out the screwdriver. I get out a tube of superglue and use it to seal the entry
     wound at the back of his neck. No more blood. It’s done in seconds.
    I chuckle as I drag my young genius friend toward my van, thinking how strange it is that there are people out there in the
     world, people far deeper and more philosophical than me, who spend their lives wondering if a tree falling in woods like this
     makes a crashing sound if there’s no one around to hear it.
    What a stupid