Free The Second Saladin by Stephen Hunter

shook his hand.
    “You had it tonight,” somebody said.
    “Couldn’t miss, could I?”
    “No way, man, no way.”
    Chardy took a last glance toward the floor—two other teams, the Gas Stations and the Ice Cream Stores, were warming up. It meant nothing, but Chardy hated to leave it. A ball came spinning his way and he bent to scoop it up. He held it, feeling its skin springy to his fingers. He looked at the hoop and saw that it was about fifty feet away.
    Shoot it, he thought.
    But a black man came galloping up to him and without a word Chardy tossed him the ball, and off he went. Chardy pulled on his jacket and headed for the doors and what lay beyond.

6
    H e stared at the picture. Yes. Ulu Beg. Years younger, but still Ulu Beg.
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “Good. Getting it was no easy thing,” said Trewitt, the young one, a wispy pseudo-academic type who was tall and thin and vague.
    “Once upon a time,” Chardy said. “Years and years ago.”
    “Okay,” said Trewitt. “Now this one.”
    The projector clicked and projected upon the screen on the wall of a glum office in Rosslyn a plumpish face, prosperous, solid.
    “I give up,” said Chardy.
    “Look carefully,” said Yost Ver Steeg. “This is important.”
    I
know
it’s important, Chardy thought irritably.
    “I still don’t—oh, yeah. Yeah.”
    “It’s an artist’s projection of Ulu Beg
now
. Twenty years later, a little heavier, ‘Americanized.’”
    “Maybe so,” said Chardy. “But I last saw him seven years ago. He looked”—Chardy paused. Words were not his strong point; he could never get them to express quite what he wanted—“fiercer, somehow. This guy was in awar for twenty years. He was a guerrilla leader for nearly ten. You’ve got him looking like a Knight of Columbus.”
    A harsh note of laughter came from the other young one, Miles something-Irish. It was a caustic squawk of a laugh; Miles was a kind of Irish dwarf, an oily little jerk, but he’d know what a Knight of Columbus was.
    “Well,” Trewitt said defensively, “the artist had a lot of experience on this sort of thing. He worked all night. We just got the picture in yesterday. It’s the only one of Ulu Beg extant.”
    “Try this one, Paul,” said Yost Ver Steeg.
    Johanna. Chardy stared at her. The face could have been spliced out of any of a thousand of his recent nights’ worth of dreams. It meshed perfectly with all those nights of memory and struck him with almost physical force.
    “It’s very recent,” said Yost.
    Chardy stared at the image projected against the wall. He felt as if he were in a peep-show booth for a quarter’s worth of pointless thrill with other strange men in a dark place.
    “A week ago, I think. Is that right, Miles?” Yost said.
    “Tuesday last.” Miles’s voice was sure and smug and had a recognizable Chicago tang to it.
    “Has she changed much in seven years?”
    “No,” was all Chardy could think to say, offended by the ritual he knew the shot to represent: some seedy little man from Technical Services, up there with a motor-driven Nikon with a 200-millimeter lens, parked blocks away in his car or van, shooting through one-way glass after three days’ stalk.
    Chardy rubbed his dry palms together. He glanced over at the three shapes with whom he shared Johanna’s image: Yost, almost a still life, a man of deadness, and the two younger fellows, dreamy Trewitt and the loathsome Miles What-was-it?, the dumpy little Irish guy from Chicago.
    “Did you know”—Miles spoke from the comer—“that in the years she’s been back she’s tried to kill herself three times?”
    A kind of pain that might have been grief seemed to work up through Chardy’s knees. He swallowed once, feeling his heart beat hard, or seem to, at any rate. He clenched his fists together.
    “I didn’t know that. I don’t know anything about what happened to her.”
    Chardy could almost feel Miles smile in the dark. He’d only glimpsed him in the