Doc wasn't dead and I thought, 'Shit, I'll bring him back and see what happens.' Goldman stopped writing novels after the publication of Brothers: It was one of those funny things. It just ended. It came as a shock to me. I don't know what happened. My wife left me the next year and that certainly was a change... When I was a novelist - those thirty years - something comes along and hits you and you think, 'Oh my God, that might be interesting,' but I haven't had an idea for that for twenty years now. If I started writing a novel tomorrow it wouldn't shock me because, as we all know, it's all instinctive. Characters Henry David "Doc" Levy a.k.a. Scylla - The main character, he is rescued from the events in Marathon Man and recovers. He no longer has fingerprints, he received a facelift, and his voice is different. Ma Perkins crafts him so he can be an assassin that cannot be tracked down. Kirkus Reviews described him as "laconic" and states that the character is "firmly unengaging as he moves from one hand-to-hand combat to the next." "Ma" Perkins - The person who fixes Scylla/Doc, and Doc's direct supervisor, Perkins is described by Dick Lochte of the Los Angeles Times as "an immense spymaster". Perkins, called "rotund" by the West Coast Review of Books, likes eating food from the Carnegie Deli, and is married to a quadriplegic woman. Perkins is murdered. Hondo - An assassin who causes his victims to fall or to crush them. He is competitive. Cheetah - An assassin who kills with an artificial claw. He is competitive. Beverage - The top official at the Division. Stephen Dobyns wrote in The New York Times that Beverage's defining trait is that he wished to have "a comic book zap gun so he could disintegrate those who displeased him" and that if this was the case the number of people on Earth would plummet. The Blond - An assassin who removes faces from people with his knife after making them into "forms". Lochte describes him as "narcissistic". Publishers Weekly describes him as "almost superhuman". J.F. "Arky" Vaughan a.k.a. Uncle Arky - A scientist who created a chemical that causes people to commit suicide. His name is a reference to a baseball player, Arky Vaughan. He kills his nephew, Scout, and his nephew's girlfriend. Milo Standish