He snatched up the card. It read:

Nothing more. There was no address. No phone number. No fax. No e-mail. It didn’t even list his organization.

Griffin had left no way to get in touch with him.

Leyster grabbed the phone, punched up an outside line, and dialed directory assistance. Simultaneously, he booted up his Internet account. There were millions of records out there. The days when a man could accomplish anything at all without leaving any trace of himself behind were long gone. He’d find Griffin for sure.

But after an hour, he had to admit defeat. Griffin’s name was listed in no directory Leyster could locate. He worked for no known government agency. So far as Leyster could tell, he had never posted a comment of any kind on any subject whatsoever, or been referred to, however fleetingly, by anyone.

The man did not seem to exist.

In the end, Leyster could only wait. Wait, and hope that the bastard would return.

And what if he didn’t? What if he never came back?

These were the questions that Leyster was to ask himself a hundred times a day, every day for a year and a half. The time it took Griffin to get around to ending his silence with a phone call.

2. The Riddle of Achilles

Crystal City, Virginia: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2012 C.E.

Leyster was the only person in the van who wasn’t peering out the windows, excitedly drawing attention to advertisements and the new Metrobuses, leaning into the glass when they passed a construction site. They’d all been given the day’s Washington Post at the Pentagon, and it was a toss-up whether the comics or the editorial pages amused them more. He could understand their nostalgia, but he couldn’t feel it.

To him, it was just the present.