Whether the guys noticed or not, my fingers were a bit shaky as I opened the supply drawer.* * * * *Bob made it a point of interacting with me far... more that morning than normal. And every time he did I wondered if he would want me in his office for more of the same, but it always had something to do with a project, a company account, or some more trivial thing. By lunchtime when he came to his door, I looked up quick only to find him smiling and indicating he was running out for a minute.. The architect of that pain, or one of them, was close. Close enough for her to feel him moving through the throngs of innocents in the dirty street below her third floor window.Barry Cuevas, known to the streetwise as ?The Fixer' had set up the frame for murder that had sent her original self to eventual humiliation and violation so terrible he had taken his own life. Payment for that would be extracted. Over a long period of time, and with a minimum of gentleness. Her peculiar abilities. Isolated from prying officers, missileers often find themselves with relaxed discipline. And it was through this combination of license and boredom that Lieutenant Stanislav Petrosian snuck a floppy disk into the heart of Mertvaya Ruka: the Dead Hand. Mertvaya Ruka was designed to succeed where a human might falter. If the Soviet High Command were obliterated in nuclear fire, its machine brain would whirr to life, awoken by sensors that detected the blast and the absence of any signals from the. A good bong or joint hit, right? Some proper weed! And if I had to guess, yeah, knowing her as ... intimately as I do, BPD is the most likely culprit. Maybe she can get some real help like she needs ... in prison,” I shrugged, “I’ll have to wait to have the papers ready, but as soon as I can, I’ll skip the process server and serve them to her myself in jail. Assuming that I’m allowed to visit her, that is. Okay, now enough about the ex. She’s a depressing topic.”“Depressing, yes, except when.