Free The 4 Phase Man by Richard Steinberg

looking up at the much bigger man. “I’ve been asked to give you a message.”
    Xenos laughed. “Since when are you a messenger boy?
    “Since this morning,” it seems.
    “I don’t believe it.” Xenos sounded almost sorry for the old man. “Who’s the message from? He sat down beside him.”
    “Don’t really know,” myself. But it comes from so high, I get nosebleeds just thinking about it. The briefest of pauses. “If I allowed myself to think about it, that is.”
    Xenos had never seen the man look anything but confident. And he didn’t look unconfident now. Just
less
confident. It was an impressive sight. As if Mount Rushmore had suddenly grown a new head.
    “What’s the message?
    “Son, you’re in it deep this time,” Herb said in a cautionary tone. “You’re shaking someone’s tree hard enough for them to worry about all-ever falling out.” He took out the cigar and gestured at the forest of government buildings around them. “Look around, Jerry. What do you see? What do you smell?”
    Xenos just stared blankly at the man, wondering vacantly if the shot would come from the tourists taking pictures on his left or the teens making out on his right.
    “What you smell,” the old cold warrior continued slowly, “is fear. This city was founded on it. Fear of offending the wrong person, or of not puckering properly to another. Fear of being passed over, fear of being singled out.” He leaned in so close Xenos could smell the sausages he used to share with the man every Thursday afternoon. “Fear of being discovered.”
    “You used to preach fear,” Xenos whispered. “Used to call it the great safety.”
    “Not this kind of fear. What we’re talking about here, Jerry, is stupid fear. The kind that makes otherwise sane people do crazy things. Things they’ll regret later, make private grievings over, but finite,
permanent
things.” He shrugged. “No one is safe when that kind of fear starts going around. It’s like an airborne virus passed from a man on the street, to another on a telephone, to a man in a tiny office. Eventually working its way up the line until even the eunuchs in their corner suites have caught the contagion.” The briefest, most spasmodic frown. “And when they catch it, son, the only cure is kill.”
    For the first time, Xenos saw something else in his old boss’s eyes. Something he would have bet his life (and had many times) could never exist within this man.
    Doubt.
    “That your message?”
    Herb gestured with his cigar, and a black town car rolled silently up. “No,” he said simply. He stood up, looking down at the one man he’d thought he’d never lose, then lost.
“My
message is far simpler.”
    He put the cigar away, pulling a plane ticket out of the same pocket. “Your flight leaves in two hours, nonstop to Athens.” He turned and walked over to the open car door. “Don’t miss it.”
    When the car door didn’t close, Xenos got up and walked over. “And?”
    “What did you do in New York?”
    “You tell me.”
    “I wish I could.” He was silent for a minute. “Care to tell me what you told Hard-Ass Alvarez just now?”
    Xenos remained silent.
    Herb shook his head, closed the door, but lowered the window. “Don’t ever change.” He laughed lightly. “Stay pure forever, son. It’s what you do best.”
    Xenos handed the ticket back to the old man. “Message rejected.”
    The old man took the ticket and put it away. “You still don’t get it.” The engine started. “The message was in a 9mm that I never ordered to fire.” The car started to pull away. “The ticket was from me.”
    As he listened to the whines and whistles of the electronically swept line, the man entered the access code he needed. But before hitting the enter key, he carefully looked around the empty office—the office he’d ordered emptied immediately after getting a report on the encounter outside the Capitol.
    As satisfied as the paranoid man ever was, he took a