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recently had been shaved. Faust detested body hair. Each morning, he shaved his head and the few patches of skin on his body that were not horribly scarred by the burn. Only his eyebrows remained. Removing them would only draw attention when traveling outside. His line of work demanded anonymity.
    Faust walked across the hardwood floor in his bare feet to the living area. Clipped to the waistband of his pants was a phone with a wire running to the headset and microphone. He would be on the phone a large part of the day.
    It was safe to talk. The windows were multiple-pane glass with a Mylar film inside. If someone outside was using a laser listening device to pick up vibrations off the glass, they wouldn't be able to hear anything. The phone he used had state-of-the-art digital encryption that Raymond Bouchard and his private group of twenty-first-century warriors couldn't crack. The condo's walls were lined with copper and for added security he had devices that prevented phone calls, conversations, and emissions from TV and computer screens from being picked up by any outside monitoring devices.
    Mounted on the wall was an audio system along with a single row of neatly stacked titles of rare vinyl records that dated back to the early fifties. He preferred vinyl records over audio tapes and compact discs, or the more popular MP3 music files, which could be pirated from any number of Internet sites. Faust found the weight and feel of the cardboard sleeve in his hands comforting, the way the needle sounded when it first hit the record, implying a shared intimacy between the singer and listener.
    He was in the mood for something soulful. He scanned the titles…
    Dinah Washington. Perfect. He removed the cardboard with his bare hands and then slid out the record, catching a whiff of the aged, moldy cardboard. The man who brought him these records, Gunther the boy Faust had raised himself, used a special cleaning process to disinfect the record. Ultraviolet light killed lingering germs on the cardboard sleeve.
    Faust played one of his favorite songs: "TV Is the Thing This Year." As Dinah sang over the ceiling-mounted speakers, he walked into the kitchen, rubbing his hands over the cool, smooth surface of the Corian counters. He preferred the look of granite but couldn't risk possible infection. Granite was notorious for holding germs and lethal bacteria deep in the microscopic crevices, places that not even the cleaning solutions could reach. He opened the Sub-Zero refrigerator and removed a glass bottle of water. Faust had the water imported from Iceland, where the water came from a glacier that was over one thousand years old. He did not drink water from the United States, and avoided drinking any fluid stored in plastic. The chemical used to form plastic, Bisphenol-A2, was a carcinogen known to leach its way into bottled water. The world was in such a deplorable state, plagued with viral diseases that had no cure and cancers and toxins that lived in the very air we breathed, the food and water we ate. Faust knew his measures were extreme, but they would help to ensure his health. He had to live in order to carry out his personal vision.
    The phone rang. Faust pressed the TALK button.
    "Yes, Gunther."
    "Conway and Dixon are on their way to the skydiving school."
    "How many following?"
    "A surveillance unit and two vans containing their Hazard Teams."
    Since Major Dixon wouldn't make it to the airport, there was no need to direct any resources to the IWAC members lurking about the terminal or the CIA's base of operations, Delburn Systems.
    The exchange of the disc, no doubt laced with a computer virus, was not going to occur today.
    "And how is Major Dixon?"
    "Nervous. At breakfast Conway tried to talk Dixon out of skydiving."
    "Obviously. And?"
    "Dixon wouldn't back down. He wants to go through with it."
    "Good for him. It's about time the boy came into his own." And over time Faust would show him how the same way he had taught