There is a limit to the amount of shock the human body can absorb. I'd had mine. I didn't care if he shot me or offered a cigarette—I had reached the end of my line. He did neither. He offered me a cigar instead.
"Have one of these, diGriz, I believe they're your brand."
The body is a slave of habit. Even with death a few inches away it will respond to established custom. My fingers moved of their own volition and took the cigar, my lips clenched it and my lungs sucked it into life. And all the time my eyes watched the man behind the desk waiting for death to reach out.
It must have shown. He waved towards a chair and carefully kept both hands in sight on top of the desk. I still had my gun, it was trained on him.
"Sit down diGriz and put that cannon away. If I wanted to kill you, I could have done it a lot easier than herding you into this room." His eyebrows moved up in surprise when he saw the expression on my face. "Don't tell me you thought it was an accident that you ended up here?"
I had, up until that moment, and the lack of intelligent reasoning on my part brought on a wave of shame that snapped me back to reality. I had been outwitted and outfought, the least I could do was surrender graciously. I threw the gun on the desk and dropped into the offered chair. He swept the pistol neatly into a drawer and relaxed a bit himself.
"Had me worried there for a minute, the way you stood there rolling your eyes and waving this piece of field artillery around."
"Who are you?"
He smiled at the abruptness of my tone. "Well, it doesn't matter who I am. What does matter is the organization that I represent."