Shadow Watch

Harlan DeVane stared out the window as his ascending plane pierced the clouds and the landscape below dissolved into far-reaching blankness.

What had happened in Kazakhstan was truly regrettable, he thought. The Colombian and Peruvian leftists had paid him a large sum of money to settle their various grudges. As had the Albanian guerrillas… as, unknown to them, had their sworn enemies in Belgrade. And there would have been a long line of future clients, many with sharply conflicting interests, all willing to abide by his insistence on neutrality and confidentiality. Just last week, when things had looked so promising, Iran and Iraq had both made generous offers meant to cause problems for each other. New York, Washington, Moscow, Baghdad, Teheran… DeVane was quite the egalitarian when it came to selecting his targets of destruction, and would have been leasing time on the Havoc device for many weeks to come before an astronaut team could be sent up to disable it.

He sighed. It was over, he had to concede that. Over for now. But he had never told his customers that success was a certainty, and he’d given Roger Gordian quite an initial workout, hadn’t he?

Really, it was best to look at the bright side.

A world full of strife was a world full of profit, and DeVane saw no end in sight to either.