Try as he might, Harry couldn't keep the spectre of Jorge's body out of his mind.

"Why are you so uppity today, Harry?" Brian spoke suddenly with his habit of misusing words he had recently discovered in books.

Harry maneuvered Brian's wheelchair around some orphan bricks dumped weeks ago for road repairs yet to begin. They were in a timely start to their day. After dropping Brian for his daycare/homeschooling appointment, Harry would be off to his lumber factory and then to the Bureau.

The younger boy was busy reading Grodo, his mahogany hair fluttering in the wind. Harry had given up after a few times of trying to smoothen all that hair. He did not know how to do this.

He did not know how to answer Brian. He did not know how to characterize this gnawing emotion inside of him that kept pulling his focus away from everything else. And he certainly didn't know how to open up and let the child in as he struggled between grief and resisting a morose sense of loss.

Harry decided not to reply. He kept his eyes trained on the fissured road, picking his way between ugly, decaying buildings of various sizes - all dull, basic geometric shapes. Only the large graffiti letters imploding across the boundary walls occasionally broke the sameness. His favorite line was by the local sensation Hareem:

The future is an alien mothership that parks above the big cities.

Harry turned away from the throng of faceless people coming in from the junction. They were filing to plug themselves into assembly lines of myriad factories in his neighborhood that will suck on their blood till evening.

Crossing the road, he passed into the street behind Eternal Wok, the eatery that signaled the start of Monk's Finger. This was the neighborhood adjacent to his Batonville. It was named after a local Asian legend who defied giving up his property even after the land mafia cut off his index finger. The neighborhood housed immigrants and citizens of a variety of national backgrounds from all over Asia. Still, the whole place was often branded as Chinatown, a dumbed down label Harry refused to apply on principle.

Threading their way through narrow streets, they came upon the house next to the lone banyan tree.

The young lady who opened the door, Hiro Ishimoro, was a bespectacled, prim-looking girl of long-fingered, artist's hands. Also, a math teacher in training, she doubled as a homeschooler to Brian. The school where Brian was otherwise supposed to go was full of kids not too kind on peers who couldn't beat them in a race.

"Have you managed to get in touch with Brian's parents, yet? I don't think you are a capable enough caretaker for him." Hiro hadn't even allowed for pleasantries before firing her missile.

"That's dour even for your standards, Hir." He raised an eyebrow.

"Don't call me th--"

"Force of habit, I guess." It came out a bit more bitterly than he'd expected.

Once upon a time ...

Unrequited love ...

Broken promises ...

Or whatever cliche phrase you might wanna insert at this point about an engagement ended a year ago.

He curbed the impulse to laugh at her condescending smile. Brian saved him from replying to the implication of Hiro's arched brow by jumping in:

"They want nothing to do with me and you know that." There were hurts of several kinds in Brian's tone. Harry laid a gentle hand on the child's mop in a show of support. "Stop punishing Harry for it."

"So you guys are just continuing like this? You can't wheel him around all his life, you know?"

Sheesh, these former fiancee and their bluntness.

"Obviously not. I'm taking Brian to the Medusa Hope Center tomorrow. I think we can arrange for some medical attention for his legs there."

"Isn't that what you said a month ago?" Hir's brow was as arched as a hunter's bow.

"We really did visit the center then," Brian added helpfully.

"They probably turned you down, didn't they?" Hir kept her laser eyes focused on Harry's.

"Yes, they did, but … look. They are not gonna turn down a kid in need a third time, will they know?" Harry's voice was raised earnestly.

Hiro just tilted her head disapprovingly and pushed the door open wide. "Inside. Now."

When Harry left five minutes later, Brian was well nestled on a rocking chair with his sketchbook and crayons in hand and an easel lowered to his sitting height on the frame. On the easel, there was a half-painted old man staring in the mirror at his former child self.

***

What's in a name? A pattern of phonetic sounds. Meaningless to him.

As usual, Martin the Nosy Nerd had been giving Harry grief about the apparent phoniness of his full name Harry Henderson.

It was his second anniversary as a 'monitor' for the Bureau of Population Research, Fort Myers office and his colleagues had been roasting him since lunch.

He threw the empty bowl of pie he was eating - the wonderful WonderGurl had shared some of hers with him - and got out of the lunching corridor.

Right by the entrance to the main hall containing the cubicle farm, a big bulletin board celebrated the successes of the Fort Myers office. A chart beside it tabulated the performance of all the monitors. Harry had been consistently topping it for months now.

He had joined for the 'cloak without the dagger' job definition that he had once seen at a bus stop:

Protect your neighborhood.

Become a watchful eye.

Come be a Monitor to your community.

His job, the trainer had convinced his class of trainees, would allegedly help prevent epidemic breakouts, insidious drug trades, and terrorist acts in the making.

He had accepted the part time commitment hoping for a permanent vacancy which had yet to happen. Ironically, it was the nature of the job that thwarted his goal. He was a good Monitor, been on the streets more than half his life, knew all the ins and outs of Lee county, and was well-known and probably liked by hundreds of acquaintances.

But that also meant, his most useful status was out on the streets, rather than holed up inside as some kind of clerk.

He spent twenty minutes finishing and proofreading his report then got up.

"Hey, the Puzzler."

With disdain Harry realized Hackster who worked in the Information Room must have spotted him. Sure enough, the guy with Harry Potter glasses was excitedly waving at him by the watercooler. With a sigh, Harry took to that corner as that was the only way to access the senior offices.

"Our best monitor in two years and still slaving away at the farm." Hackster smacked Harry's arm with an unwelcome familiarity as he approached. "Bugs me no end."

Leaning closer into Harry and lowering his voice, he continued: "One course would do the trick. $150 only. Special concession for the Puzzler. You'll finish it in a month. Whenever you are free."

Harry brushed Hackster's hand away and moved into the narrow passway beside the large open door of the Information Room.

"I see what you got there, buddy," Hackster called with a click of his tongue and - sight unseen - a pretty awkward wink. "'Special access' for the Puzzler!"

Monitors were supposed to file their reports in the online system. At best, they could report new faces that stood out in their communities to the Recorders but the farm in the hall was usually the extent of their reach. Harry's superior performance, however, had recently earned him special access. He could discuss standout material directly with his supervisor.

Harry passed three doors to his right before he stopped to knock at the third from the last.

"Come in," rose a hollow echo from the room, calling to mind a beckoning of the dead in a deep dark sepulchre. He wasted no time slipping into the tomb.

A small dusty man in a small dusty room.

Harry had no idea where he had heard this line, it always came to him whenever he entered this room.

The small dusty man was sitting half-hidden behind his desk, surrounded by dusty old shelves full of dusty old files. Nothing was neatly arranged. It was a tomb of records and numbers belonging to nameless multitudes. Harry often wondered what prompted this man, Timothy Ross, to cling these old cobwebs like a sentinel of the ancient and the bygone, away from the modern spiders of technology crawling everywhere else outside.

With a flick of his head, Timothy Ross pointed to the chair in front of the desk.

His skin looked opaque and devoid of any moisture. It was like the yellowing paper of a last-century book before it disperses to merge with the history it once contained. His lips were parched like withered leaves baked well and long in the sun. Even his hair had the texture of ashes.

Harry took the chair, but he wanted to go to the window behind this man and cough all the dust away.

"A curious assignment has come my way. I thought of you." As Timothy Smith spoke, Harry tried to recall why the heck they all called him The Duke. He had a stodgy build with a stern bloodhound look permanently plastered around his broad nose, but his height did him no favors.

"I can handle it." Harry uttered the stock answer to keep from actual conversation, eyes on the tabletop. He tried to keep himself from getting too excited, if this was indeed going where he thought this was going.

"I've trained you well. The cogs turn. The engine whistles. The knight moves forward ready to make a turn. In short, the plot thickens; it's time to test the pawn." With a bureaucrat's heightened sense of authority, The Duke pushed a file directly in front of Harry.

It looked brand new with a bright blue color fresh off the stationer's. An anomaly in the Duke's office.

"Your truncated copy. Go into Reading Room A. Come right back after, with your response."

Harry shot out of the room and retraced his steps. Some of the monitors in the front row cubicles looked at him in awe or envy as he passed the main hall. He purposefully strode into the passway on the opposite side with a good guess of what they must be thinking.

Reading Room A was surprisingly small but had a comfortable looking chair with a narrow mahogany desk. He grabbed the chair, placed the file on the desk, and began to read.

The first few pages that should have contained the sender's information were missing. The print in the remaining pages, six in total, was redacted. Harry tried peering at the concealed parts of the text from the blank side of the paper, but the marker that had been used was really good.

He focused on the unconcealed text.

In the absence of any 'identifying information', the text was like that generic bowl of punch when the tongue feels distinct flavors, but the ingredients still elude the brain.

The first quick read left him nothing. He tried again, this time with relaxed shoulders, exhaling deep. Some concepts began to float on the sea of overbearing and broken prose.

The sender was looking for a "possessor of information" - a frequently repeated phrase. Such an abstract gender-neutral descriptor could only mean that the senders were clueless. They had no idea who or how many persons of interest there were. The complete lack of any description of this possessor added up.

The next two common phrases were 'object of interest' and 'the target information'. These seemed to be used interchangeably, with at least one instance where both appeared together connected with 'or'. He thought long and hard about it and reread all the mentions of either phrase.

Again, the sending party seemed not to know exactly what the person of interest possessed. Heck, they didn't even have a clue what was the form of this possession. What if there was no object usurped by the possessor? What if the possessor had memorized lists or data or material and discarded whatever physical form the info had before? What if the target person just knew something of seminal importance that the sending party did not want leaking out?

Wait... that was not the full scenario, was it, though? He had picked up on the scent of a third party in this gala of obscurity. He hastily turned a few pages back and forth, but didn't find anything specific to lay his finger on. It was in the way the expected situations this "possessor" might be in were described.

For instance, at one place it was written:

"The possessor might have found refuge with a group either extremely loyal to them or with an interest of their own, or, the members of the group are not identified in any database."

At another point it was written:

"Despite these possibilities, we strongly suspect the possessor is on the move. There are systematic patterns of movement by hired detectives and other crew, combing state after state. The concentration of the search pattern was noticed last in Utah."

So this possessor was a major target and at the very least a third party was looking for the same person with a team of hired henchmen.

This is dense.

But it was denser. The third party and the sender of this file must have lost track of the target after Utah.

So, is that what it was ... a general purpose issue to put the hounds on scent, see where the target turns up next, trying to beat the third party to the chase?

Harry metaphorically wiped the sweat off his forehead.

His epiphany about his workplace seemed proven true. This Bureau cooked more than what the door-sign claimed.

He didn't want to ask himself the bigger elephant of a question: Why was he being tapped for this? He knew good monitors had been given assignments before but this ... this felt big. Not that he would question it. This could be the promotion he was looking for.

In fifteen minutes, he was back in the tomb.

Placing the file on the table, he grabbed the table's edge with both hands, and looked squarely into the transparent beady eyes of Timothy Smith, desperately trying to contain his nervous excitement.

"Count me in. If what they are looking for is in southern Florida at all, no harm in giving this a try."

"Are you sure you can contribute? It won't affect your wages." The Duke held his gaze with a warning: duck out now if you are not committed.

"Yes. Positive."

The Duke took a black felt-tipped pen from a pencil-holder and proceeded to christen the assignment scribbling big letters on the blank name card on the cover. As he turned the file back towards Harry, the boy could taste the intrigue on the back of his mouth.

In large, unruly letters two words were scrawled:

THE DISMANTLER