It had been a battle to get there. Almost every step of the way he’d had to fend off looks and inquiries about his face. By the time he got to the office section of the third floor, he was giving one-word answers to all questions — ‘Accident.’ ‘Lights,’ he said as he swung around behind his desk. But the lights didn’t come on and Pierce realized that his voice was different because of the swelling of his nasal passages. He got up and turned on the lights manually and then went back to the desk. He took off his sunglasses and put them on top of his computer monitor. He picked up the envelope and checked the return address. Cody Zeller pulled a painful smile out of him. In the return address Zeller had put the name Eugene Briggs, the Stanford department head the Doomsters had targeted many years before. The prank that had changed their lives. The smile dropped off his face when Pierce turned over the envelope to open it. The pull tab had already been torn — the envelope was open.
