“Oh God—they did it, the bastards did it!” exclaimed Simon as he leaped from his seat at the head of the conference table.

Oh God, he thought, whoever did it is coming for us because we know. We will be silenced. Simon is toast, Will’s off to save the world, horn dog Joe is off to get laid one last time—and that is your chance.

Aaron continued to chant ‘Om’ as he packed his ear with tissue, and finally corked each ear with a spit soaked tissue crunched so tightly that it would expand snuggly, sealing the canal.

Look at Goddamned Will, blood running out of his ears—what a nut. And there is Joe ambling off to his well lubricated doom.

Aaron stood slowly and confidently, gathered himself with a final ‘Om’ and walked down the hall in the wake of his idiot-savant colleagues to face the last day on earth.

Anyone wearing ear protection is here to put you down. Walk as if you are in a trace—that’s it, easy zombie boy.

Aaron’s phony trance cracked like fallen glass when he saw ‘Casper the Prune’ Mrs. Peachtree getting it on with the Nigerian security guard—a guard who’s gun was gone. Oh God—no, one of these nerdites has a gun!

Just as he pushed on the heavy oak door he heard the thunder of semi-automatic pistol fire to his right—can’t head down the back way, out the front it is.

He considered then that his ear protection would not be adequate to filter out loudspeaker commands and other directed media and decided to head to the I-phone store to loot some earphones.

Aaron pushed open the door as the gunshots tailed off and stepped out cautiously, looking right. What he saw made him leak some urine into his Joseph A. Banks fitted briefs, hopefully not staining his slacks. A tall dark-suited man wearing head and chin-strapped ear protection was easing Joe down onto the floor as he pulled a steel needle of a dagger from his squirting neck.

Making certain to step off silently Aaron made his move, only to feel the heavy door slam shut behind him with a shaking of the very floor. For a moment he froze in his tracks, then the man—Agent Hildebrand, the agent who dropped off and picked up their confidentials—turned and regarded him with a cold predator purpose.

Aaron was spurred to action. He had been the captain of the track and field team at Princeton. He was still wearing his sneakers and could out distance this goon in his dress shoes any day of the week. Aaron sprinted around the corner and sprawled face first onto the rough carpet, over Simon’s body, which lay in a pool of expanding blood.

I can make it! Aaron thought to himself in a spasm of gritty determination, and lunged forward crawl running at first, and then sprinting full tilt toward freedom. In seconds he was reaching out for the door to the Pratt Street stairway. As he reached for the silvery knob it was sprayed with a red spatter, as was the sleeve of his yellow cardigan. Before him appeared a hole in the steel door, neatly punched he thought, and down the sleeve of his now rusty cardigan gushed a stream of crimson, a stream he seemed to fall past and away from even as he gave it birth.

The sound of his head slamming into the hard carpeted floor rang hollow, far more hollow than he had ever envisioned his end.