Free The End Game by Raymond Khoury Page B

salvation.
    Handing his Harvard University travel mug to his regular morning barista, he ordered his regular morning drink—an Earl Grey Tea Latte—into which he poured a generous splash of cold half-and-half at the milk station. He noticed that the thermos was running rather low, but by good fortune held the exact amount of milk for his beverage.
    Sipping his drink, he drove along Beacon and turned left into Clarendon, parking just before the intersection with Boylston Street. He took his gym bag from his car and walked the hundred yards to Boston Sports Club.
    He entered the BSC—or at least attempted to—at the exact moment that a slim man wearing a fedora tried to do likewise. After the socially acceptable number of “sorrys” and an immaculately polite “no, excuse me,” the fedora-wearing man deferred and stepped aside, eventually following Padley inside the building.
    This exchange caused Padley to wonder why men no longer wore hats as a matter of course. His grandfather had always worn a Homburg and had told the young Ralph that a man’s choice of hat said much about him, but as young Ralph had still been somewhat conflicted about what he wanted to say about himself, he had chosen not to wear a hat. He now had something to offer the world, something of which he could rightly be proud, and wondered whether it wasn’t the time to choose a form of headwear. As things stood, he favored an ivy cap, perhaps in corduroy or wool—anything but Harris Tweed, he mused, thinking it would definitely send out the wrong signal—though he reserved the right to change his mind and opt for something more flamboyant.
    He changed, draining the final few drops of his latte as he placed his gym bag inside the locker, then headed straight for the basement pool, which was twenty-five meters long with three lap lanes. At this hour, on a weekday, there was plenty of space for him to swim a hundred lengths of the fluid, rhythmic crawl that had many younger men watching in admiration.
    He slipped into the water.
    He did a couple of lengths, enjoying the feel of the water sliding around him, feeling the adrenaline light up his body.
    Then he felt something else.
    A twanging sensation in his chest.
    Having self-administered every possible test for heart function many times over, he dismissed this and powered on toward the end of another length.
    As he came out of a perfectly executed flip turn, he felt a sharp pain in his left ventricle.
    His ability to self-diagnose offered him a brief, albeit illusory, moment of control. But as he passed the ten-meter line, he realized with no little surprise that he was in ventricular fibrillation.
    Impossible.
    He couldn’t breathe, and gasping for air only made him inhale a lungful of chlorinated water. He was helpless. His entire body, including his head, was now under the surface.
    At the edges of his perception, Padley felt the water being displaced as a lifeguard dived into the pool. Within seconds, he was being dragged toward the pool’s edge, where another lifeguard helped pull him out of the water.
    The first lifeguard began CPR, but Padley had by now retreated into his oxygen-starved brain and was entirely unaware of what was going on around him. He knew he was now asystolic, which triggered the thought—absurd though it seemed—that the research he had entrusted to the CIA all those years ago had somehow come back to him with interest.
    With his body now lost to him, his mind experienced a second moment of clarity as he at last realized that for several years now, his wife had been screwing his neighbor behind his back.
    As his heart became still forever, its current, or the dearth of such, only “funny” now to an absurdist, Ralph Padley smiled inside at how beautifully circular was the nature of his death.
    Indeed, if he had been able to tell anyone, he would have said he was quite convinced he saw his brother’s angelic face before everything went dark and he entirely forgot who