She considered it for a full minute, and sighed. "I don't think I can take another four years," she said finally. "Okay. Tell me about it."

We spent the night in a Holiday Inn. The next morning I flew to Chicago and caught a noon flight to Washington. On the way, I rolled out the tarot cards. The Fool showed again. That's cool, I thought, that's okay.

I was at Washington National by three o'clock and took a cab down to a shabby, secondhand business district, a place called the Sugar Exchange. Judging from the lobby, the last white powder exchanged in the place hadn't been sugar. Dace Greeley was locking his third-floor office when I came up the stairs.

"Hey, Kidd," he said. He brought up the shaky remnant of a once-great smile. He had always been thin, even delicate, but now he was gaunt. In his twenties, he'd had an odd effect on young women: they wanted to take care of him. And those who were most likely to be burning their bras in the morning were most likely to be taking care of Dace in the evenings. It wasn't that he was hustling all the time. He'd go to a party, sit on a couch. Twenty minutes later the most interesting women in the place were hustling him. One told me it was his eyes, big dark pools under an unruly shock of black hair. His eyes were still dark, but now, against his starved face, they looked almost lemurlike. His hair had thinned and was shot through with streaks of gray.

The last time I heard about him, a mutual friend said he was spending his days in out-of-the-way bars.

"Why don't you buy me a drink?" I suggested as we shook hands.

"Sure. If you want to crawl through a dive. I've got about four dollars on me. On the other hand, you could buy me a drink and we could go someplace decent."

"Okay," I said. "I'm buying."

We skipped the aging elevator and took the stairs down.

"You're looking good," he said. "Still training? Shotokan?"

"Yeah. How about you?"

"Shit, do I look like it?"

"Hey, you look like you're doing okay."

He grabbed my coat sleeve on the bottom landing before we went into the lobby.

"Kidd, my boy, we have had some interesting times together, so don't bullshit me. I look like a wreck. I can't get a reasonable job. My wife dumped me and moved to L.A., and I don't blame her. Let's go have a couple of drinks, but no bullshit." He was pleading.

"All right. But I need to know something right now. How bad is the booze? You a drunk, or what?"

Dace laughed, a high-pitched whinny that wasn't quite a giggle. "Jesus, if I was only a drunk, I'd be okay. But if I take a fourth drink, I puke all over myself. Can't keep it down. The doctor says it's an allergy. Says I'm lucky."

"Okay. So let's go have two or three."

Dace worked at the Post back in the Watergate days, when everybody there was young and hot and tough. He was an investigator specializing in the Pentagon. He had a nose for dirt. He did one story after another, probing the cozy relationship between the generals and the industrial complex. Then he found a big one. A group of ranking Army officers helped a defense contractor cover up critical faults in a particular run of artillery shells. Correcting the problem would cost a bundle. The Vietnam War was obviously winding down. If it had ended soon enough, the defective weapons could have been routinely retired and nobody would have known. But the war didn't end soon enough. A dozen grunts were killed by the friendly fire.

Dace had a leak, a disgruntled colonel with some combat ribbons of his own. The story was big. A brace of generals-a total of three stars' worth-and a half-dozen colonels found themselves looking for work. Dace was on his way. Or so he thought.

But the Pentagon was tired of Dace Greeley. When another story surfaced, even bigger than the first, Dace had it cold and had it exclusively. The Post ran it big, and it turned out to be a figment of someone's imagination. Supporting documents were fraudulent; sources denied their quotations.

Dace was held up as an overstepper, a reporter more intent on success than on the truth. Watergate had come along by then, with Nixon's attacks on the press. Everything had to be squeaky clean. The Post dropped Dace like a hot potato. Nobody wanted to hear about a conspiracy of military bureaucrats: who believes in that kind of fairy tale?

He went West for a year, worked on a solid, smaller paper, but he wanted Washington. There were no newspaper jobs, so he wound up in public relations. He was bad at it, but he was cheap and persistent, and eventually built a semipermanent relationship with a sportsmen's lobbyist group.

"I can live with myself," he told me over the first drink.

"You ever think about a book? A solid piece of work? You could do it."

"Who's got the time? I have to eat," he said. "I've got alimony. I'm four or five months behind, but it's out there. I'd need two years to do something right."

"I've got a project," I told him. "It's illegal. They could put you in jail if you were caught. I'll cover for you, but there aren't any guarantees."

"Doesn't sound so good," he said morosely, rattling his ice cubes.

"There are two good reasons to do it," I said.

"Tell me." He held a finger up to the waitress and pointed at our glasses.

"One: we fuck over some of those guys who tore you up with the Post, or guys just like them. Two: you get a quarter million in cash. Nobody knows where it comes from, nobody knows how much. You can spend the rest of your life in Mexico. Do six books."

"Jesus, who do we kill?"

"Nobody. You do research, take care of some logistics. Write some press releases and get them to people who'll read them. Figure out a way to cover us, so nobody will know where they're coming from. Do some light typing."

"What the hell are you into, Kidd?" His next drink was forgotten, and he was watching me closely.

"First, tell me what you think."

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "If it's like you make it sound-I know you haven't given me the details, but if it's morally like you make it sound-I'd buy it," he said. "I'd need to know the details."

The second round came, and when the waitress went away, I gave him a few.

The Whitemark job, if I took it, would be the first time I worked with a team. Teams are bad news; if a team is tracked and caught, there's always the possibility that a teammate will turn. The police have powerful persuaders; talk can get you a free ticket out of jail; silence can buy you five to ten, if another player talks first.

LuEllen was a solid choice. She was cool, action-oriented, decisive. A pro. She methodically calculated the possibilities and consequences of her work. She had rehearsed what she would do in virtually any situation. She didn't have to rationalize what she was doing. She knew she was a thief; she focused on being a good one.

Dace was a riskier proposition. He was good at what he did, but he lived on dreams. Dreamers lose track of what's going on around them; dreamers try to outrun bullets and outshoot cops. They move from one act to the next with no assessment of consequences. In the phony story that killed him at the Post, Dace never stopped to think, "What if these people are wrong? What if this is all bullshit?" He had fame at his fingertips. He was hot. He was on a roll. He knew he was right. A phone call might have saved him.

He had some problems, but I would take him anyway. He would not get a lot of pressure; he would mostly do paperwork. I also chose him for one of the oldest and least honored of reasons among thieves. He was available.

When I got back to St. Paul the computer was signaling that it had been accessed. Bobby. I dumped the file to the printer, and twenty feet of paper spewed out. With the exception of a few things pilfered from the Anshiser computers, it had all come from public databases. Most of it had been published in various magazines and newspapers.