The Blue Light Project Read Online Free PDF Page B

beautiful Eve Latour, whose apartment was wallpapered with photographs of her. A crazy Belgian who decided a good way to get Eve’s attention would be to take her opponent out of the race. He’d been aiming for Von Kemper, he told police.
    But all that would take days to come out. Eve didn’t have days, a thought that shafted through her as she lay writhing on the snow. And if it didn’t quite ice the pain (bruised Achilles, hairline talus fracture), the thought did reorder the hierarchy of her senses. As Von Kemper blew by her, Eve’s pain was forced to take its place behind other concerns.
    And here it came. The heroics. Eve Latour skiing and shooting on what everybody would later understand was a broken ankle. Gutting it
out into the history books. She followed Von Kemper around that course, closing, closing. Five times two and a half kilometers. She came magnificently from behind, her face a rictus of pain and concentration. And then the miraculous final sprint, passing Von Kemper on the down leg. The five-shot burst on the final targets, her breath ripping in and out of her. It was like shooting off the deck of a ship in a storm. But she knocked them down and sprinted for the finish line. Von Kemper dethroned yet somehow ecstatic, as if in relief. The Innsbruck Ibex scooped Eve up from where she lay crumpled in the snow on the far side of the finish line. Von Kemper hefted Eve as if she were a child. Kissed her neck, weeping, carried her around.
    Eve escaped briefly to the window again as the film drew to its longestablished close. Her eyes drifted out past the telescope to find the young man still bent over that same task, applying his strength to the same stubborn problem. Around him the littered evidence of human traffic. The empty drink containers and painted marks. The plastic lean-to abandoned in the elbow of a service shaft. The young man tremored, his back shifting and now, suddenly, unfurling as if something had given way. He might have been reefing on a stubborn lug nut, but whatever it was had surrendered, and the young man sprawled on his side in the gravel, then bolted to his feet, holding one hand, hunched over, grimacing. Then standing and staring straight up at the sky. Mouth open. Yelling out in exasperation, Eve thought, although she couldn’t hear it. Now standing straight again, pacing and shaking his hand. Eve could see him more clearly now. Black hair, lean and wiry. Darker skin and taller, but otherwise so strongly reminiscent of Ali.
    The film was done. The lights came up. There was a moment when a break for coffee was proposed, but Eve motioned for them to continue, her attention now hard split as the charts of personal data went up on the screen, the survey results, the storyboards of her life with turning points and moments of capsize. The way these meshed with
the story requirements of existing Double Vision clients. A training shoe manufacturer, a climbing outfitter, a financial institution. The Chinese Winter Tourism Authority. Heathrow Airport. The list was preliminary. She could say no to anyone, they assured her. There would always be more.
    Eve listened and kept her eyes in motion, nodding and communicating her full attention, while stealing glances at the rooftop opposite. The young man was in his late twenties, she guessed. And he had either finished or abandoned what had brought him up there because he was packing his things now, loading them into a black nylon knapsack, a certain irritable haste in his movements. And then, something unexpected.
    He left the knapsack on the gravel and moved to the rear of the Peavey Block rooftop, to the very lip of the parapet, where he leaned over and planted his hands on the aluminum flashing. He gripped and regripped, as if testing the surface, then upended himself into a handstand, right at the edge of the rooftop, sixty-odd feet above a sheer drop to the pavement behind the building. His body rigid and quivering. His legs first straight,