There was no mistaking the two male guests reclining on the lounge chairs in the shot. One was East Asian, terribly out of shape, sporting a potbelly and an odd pair of sunglasses; the other, a dark, bearded man, possessed an unnaturally large head, broad shoulders, and thick knees. The broad-shouldered man had a distinctive enough appearance, in fact, for Cooper to grasp why the international news media had christened him the Arabian Bulldog.

There was a third man in the shot, standing behind the other two, his image grainy and mostly out of focus, given the short depth of field of the long lens. Cooper couldn’t summon the man’s name immediately, but he recognized him, a prominent senior lieutenant, he thought, in the Chinese military. Lean and fit, his skin dark for his ethnicity, the man had the unmistakable look of a career soldier despite the casual shorts and tropical-print shirt he was modeling in the photo.

An old habit that died hard among spies was the constant review of news related to foreign affairs. As much as he’d made a game effort at checking out, once he’d settled on a permanent residence in the form of Conch Bay, Cooper had fallen back into the routine of keeping up. He routinely peeked through most major periodicals, and was, at the time he was enjoying the slide show, more or less current on international affairs. So while there seemed no apparent relation between the pictures and the plight of the late Marcel S., Cooper was nonetheless easily able to discern a rather stark connection between the three men in the photograph and the three countries Julie Laramie was investigating:

Two of the men on the lounge chairs ran them, and the third had a pretty good chunk of the military of Laramie’s primary SATINT assignment reporting up through him.

Laramie jumped when the phone rang. She’d already put on her nightshirt and was sipping the evening glass of Chardonnay, a rare night where she’d actually settled in prior to the stroke of midnight. But she was getting this way lately-jumpy.

The annoying words RESTRICTED NUMBER blinked rhythmically on the caller ID screen. Laramie decided to roll the dice.

“Yes?”

“I need your e-mail address.”

Laramie felt the stiffness in her shoulders ease but she didn’t respond until she’d returned to her seat on the couch.

“Why?”

“You’ll see when I send these pictures. Could be nothing, random coincidence, but coincidence is overrated, if you ask me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“After China, you found the same sort of exercises in North Korea. Your other lead was in Yemen, where the rebels take their orders from quite an odd-looking man, correct?”

Laramie hesitated. Given how little credence she now gave her theories, any discussion of classified topics from her home phone no longer seemed worthwhile.

“I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “Disciplined.”

Cooper broke the connection, punched Laramie’s cell number into his sat phone, hit Send, and waited for Laramie to find and answer the mobile phone.

“Is this really going to make any difference?” she said.

“You’re being smart-if they even care about you at all, it’s likely they’re only into your hard line. Now give me your e-mail address.”

Obviously she couldn’t receive the photographs at her office; nonetheless, she’d made an effort to avoid using the fabricated Yahoo! account. The whistle-blower swallowing the whistle, returning to obscurity while she still had the chance.

“Fine,” she said, and gave him the EastWest7 address. “But I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to access it. Also, this probably isn’t the best-”

“I took some pictures,” Cooper said, “of some people you’re familiar with. Together.”

Laramie wasn’t precisely sure what he meant, but if he was talking about the countries she’d been surveying, then she really didn’t know what he was talking about. What could he be talking about? Pictures? It didn’t seem possible.

“Who,” she said, “and where?”

“Have a look and call me back.”

Laramie knew he was about to hang up, W. Cooper playing the mystery man game, so she jumped in before he could do it.

“Um,” she said.

Silence-make that static. But she knew she hadn’t lost him.

“What do you do,” she said, stopped, put the phone in her lap, thought for a moment, lifted the phone again, and said, “how do you know when you’re being followed? Technically, I mean. How would you go about finding out, if you thought you were?”

More static. Laramie felt the mild warmth of frustration rise into her cheeks. She didn’t like the feeling it gave her, asking her odd new phone pal for serious advice. But who else could she ask? Eddie Rothgeb came loaded with a formidable knowledge base, but one thing he certainly didn’t bring to the table was operations experience.

“The first rule,” Cooper said, “is when you bust them, don’t let them know you’ve done it.”

“Fine, but maybe you could offer a couple, you know, technical-”

“Second rule: if you think somebody’s on you, then somebody is. Easiest thing to do, if you want to make them, is chop up your routine. Not the whole thing, just parts of it.”

Laramie thought about that for a moment. “All right,” she said.

“Where did you have dinner tonight?”

Laramie didn’t answer right away, which bothered her-and which also explained why she didn’t like asking W. Cooper questions like this. It put her at a disadvantage, Laramie knowing he’d somehow seize the opportunity to ask more personal questions than she cared to answer.

“Koo Koo Roo,” she said.

“Chicken?”

“Chicken.”

“Skinless?”

“I’m not finding the humor here, so if you-”

“Regular stop, maybe you get it to go, coming home, a couple nights a week? When you aren’t knee-deep in SATINT till two A.M.”

Laramie eyed the plastic bag with the restaurant’s logo on the kitchen counter near the phone.

Cooper said, “Keep the restaurant in the routine, but change it up. Dine in-house instead. Read a book for an hour while you eat. Visit the restroom five or six times-and keep an eye peeled while you do it. Do the same thing for every segment of your routine, and you may see the same face a couple times. You run, right?”

Laramie resisted the urge to sigh. “Yes, I run.”

“Head out the same way you always do, then change the loops. Log an extra mile or two. You get it by now.”

“I do.”

“Call me when you’ve looked at the pictures,” he said, and clicked off.

Laramie tossed the phone on the other side of the couch, lifted her wineglass, sipped, and noticed the blinds covering her living room window weren’t entirely shut. She closed them, came back to the couch, and tucked her bare legs beneath her. She pulled a blanket from the armrest, covered her legs with it, found the remote control, and punched up Headline News. She’d make her way through the gamut of 24-hour cable news networks, and maybe a few minutes of E! or Style before she crashed, but she usually chose to start things off with the twenty-two minutes as peddled by the Headline News marketing campaign.

W. Cooper, Laramie thought, is a fucking smart-ass-but I suppose I picked the right guy to ask.