“That’s vague.”

“I can’t talk about this.”

“I’m cleared higher than the head of your department, Laramie.”

“Well that’s very impressive,” she said, “but isn’t the issue.”

“No?”

“I’m not-”

“Ah,” Cooper said.

“Ah?”

“You’re not supposed to be working on what you’re working on, are you?”

Laramie hesitated.

“Fuck them,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Tough talk,” Laramie said. “You know, Professor, ‘fuck them’ isn’t the kind of advice professors usually give.”

Cooper heard a few rustling noises. Keys being dropped somewhere. And maybe, way in the background, the sound of feet kicking off shoes.

Then Laramie sighed, the sigh loud in his ear with Cooper busy straining to hear what she was up to.

“Look,” she said, “I analyze satellite intelligence. I found an unscheduled military exercise in the province they’ve assigned me in China. Shandong. The base there has mobilized and added troops in sufficient numbers to indicate there are plans in store for the real-world version of the exercise. The simulation I saw was a sea-to-land assault.”

“Taiwan.”

“That was my deduction too,” she said. “But perhaps you’re not aware of the recent strides we’ve made in Sino-American relations.”

“No,” Cooper said, “I’m not.”

“Suffice to say that if you were to write an internal Agency report documenting the deduction to which we just came, you might get a reprimand from pretty high up the chain of command.”

Cooper thought, Gates, but didn’t say anything.

“The reason I’m not officially working on what I’m working on is a little more complicated. I’m a China analyst. I know we’re growing our relationship with the PRC; it’s happening precisely due to the ideological makeup of the State Council. I know that plans for the annexation of Taiwan don’t fit the profile of eight, or even nine, of the eleven council members. I do realize the likely situation is that a couple of the most extreme vice premiers are doing it on their own. Or not alone, at least internationally speaking. So I check around and find the same thing going on in another country.”

“Where?”

“North Korea. And superanalyst Julie Laramie’s knee-jerk concluding hypothesis? A multinational ‘rogue faction’ exists. I believe it is possible that the members of the faction are jointly planning independent military actions, each hostile to U.S. interests.”

Cooper digested this for a moment. “Sounds like a reasonable hypothesis,” he said.

“Fortunately-or unfortunately-depending on whether I’m looking at it from the perspective of national security or personal job security-I’ve been checking other countries for similar exercises and seem to be finding zilch.”

“Burning the midnight oil.”

“Burning my career to a crisp. And by the way, if they didn’t have enough to go on to pink-slip me already, this phone call ought to wrap things up nicely.”

Cooper thought he heard a cork thuk gently from a bottle.

“Cell phone conversations are more labor-intensive to review,” he said. “How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“You don’t remember the cold war then.”

“You must be joking. I’ve studied-”

“When the wall came down, you were what, eleven? Go back another decade or so. Around when you were born.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Soviet Union was beating our pants off. They had fifty, sixty countries lined up, the Comintern’s revolutionary brotherhood, ready to gang-tackle us. You know how we won?”

“Are you going to give me a Ronald Reagan speech?”

“They ran out of money, and we didn’t. They couldn’t keep funding the brotherhood that had signed up for the revolutionary gravy train.”

There was silence for a moment.

Then Laramie laughed. She laughed pretty hard. Hard enough so that it took her a couple minutes to settle down.

“No kidding, Columbo,” she said, finally.

Cooper frowned.

“My dad used to say that-‘No kidding, Columbo.’ I’m an analyst, mystery man. I already thought to select the countries I was checking based on ideology. If I can be so bold as to presume that’s the advice you’re suggesting I follow.”

“Well-”

“I’m in the midst of examining SATINT from a handful of Marxist-Leninist, socialism-espousing, or otherwise anti-American, capitalism-hating countries for similar military exercises. But I can only review so much of the world per week-at some point I need to know where to look, and even then it’s still the needle-in-the-haystack thing, presuming there’s a needle to find in the first place. My one semidiscovery is in Yemen, where there is a broad troop buildup by the rebels in the southern part of the country. They’re led by a terrorist you may know of-nickname’s the Arabian Bull-dog-and they want to secede. This, however, pretty much reflects exactly what’s been going on in that pocket of the world at least once per decade for the past fifty years. Conclusion? My hypothesis is bullshit. My bosses are burying my findings because they’re wiser than I.”

Cooper sat there, stuck to the seat, thinking for a moment.

“You know,” he said, “and some of us can speak from experience on this-one thing most of your bosses are not is wise. In fact, I can think of one of them in particular who happens to be a horse’s ass. And about as wise as a horse’s ass too, while we’re at it.”

Cooper saw the door open across the street. Jim came out hurriedly, a protesting Rhonda in tow. He looked down at the in-dash clock. It said 12:33.

“Gotta run, Lie Detector,” he said. “Go easy on the Chardonnay.”

It was a guess, but Cooper took the lack of any reply before the click when Laramie hung up as affirmation of the guess. He wondered if she’d been smiling as she broke the connection-Cooper the fellow lie detector, figuring her out.

Jim didn’t bother to wait for the cab he’d presumably called for Rhonda but instead simply left her on the stairs, strolled over to his van, gunned the engine, and pulled out.

Figuring he might need the help if Jim had any excitement planned, Cooper had borrowed from a bit he’d seen in the movie Chinatown and busted one of Jim’s taillight covers a few minutes after the night’s first pager run. With the added luxury of the naked white bulb shining from the rear of the minivan, Cooper let Jim pull out and get a good way out ahead before he fell in behind. Once they hit the main drag Cooper stayed about a half mile back, easily able to see the beacon of the busted taillight up the road apiece.

He tailed Jim into one of downtown Kingston’s worst slums, about thirty minutes from the Belle Acres love nest. Jim drove around for a while, seemingly aimless, before parking his minivan in an alley. Cooper pulled the Taurus against the curb across the street from the alley, parking at an angle, so that he could see the van itself, but that was about it. He saw from the sign at the corner of the alley that they were on East Queen Street. Jim exited the van and walked out of the alley and onto East Queen, Cooper getting a good look at him as he passed under the splash of the streetlights, that bright red hair of his cut high-and-tight.

There were a couple of nightclubs and some shops on this segment of East Queen. Long since closed for the night, most of the shops were protected by the usual articulated metal cage doors; there were enough winos and junkies sleeping in the storefront alcoves that Cooper lost count trying to figure out how many were living here.

Jim went up the street, away from Cooper, and seemed to decide on a particular alcove, Cooper seeing it was a pawnshop. He disappeared into the pocket of darkness and was in there long enough for Cooper to think Jim might have shaken him when a tiny orange flame flared from the alcove. After that a similar orange glow appeared from time to time. This went on for a while, maybe twenty-five minutes, Jim having a smoke under the awning of a pawnshop at one-thirty in the morning on one of the worst streets in all of Kingston.