“The boat,” he said.

Laramie rose to her knees and leaned over the square. She didn’t look only at the place where he’d pointed.

“Where did you get these?”

Cooper flattened a second square about half a chessboard from the square that featured the boat, and knelt beside it. He ignored Laramie’s question.

“The night after Muscle-head’s pals stopped by to say hi, I took another look at these things. They were just about all I had to go on. Except maybe your memo, that is.”

When he found what he was looking for, he set his finger against the photo.

“You’re the analyst,” he said. “What’s that?”

Laramie hesitated. Cooper didn’t grasp why at first, then understood what it was-the way he was sitting, facing her, and the place he was asking her to look, could have meant he was planning on showing her something in addition to the satellite shot. He adjusted the position of his leg; she lowered her eyes and crawled over.

When she’d examined the place in the ocean where Cooper was pointing, Laramie rose to her knees, looked around, found Cooper’s unused glass-he was drinking from the bottle-flipped the glass upside down, and set it on the surface of the photo. She checked, found it did what she wanted it to do, and, using it as a magnifying glass, leaned over the place where Cooper was pointing and took as close a look as she could under the circumstances. When she was through, Laramie leaned back on her heels and looked at him.

“I think that’s the conning tower of a small submarine,” she said.

Cooper nodded. “Pretty good, Lie Detector. That was my guess too.”

Cooper watched her as she thought of the same series of things he’d thought of when he’d made the discovery of the submarine.

“Go ahead,” he said, “ask.”

“All right, I will. How the hell are we going to take a look underneath Muscle-head’s island?”

Cooper smiled. He realized as he did it that it wasn’t something he did often.

“Let me see what I can do,” he said, and pulled his sat phone from his waist.

When Carlos Muske, the president’s national security advisor, had finished reading the Julie Laramie surveillance reports compiled by Sperling Rhone, Gates’s former private security man, he closed the file and said to Lou Ebbers, “The motives of your deputy director are somewhat difficult to grasp.”

Ebbers said, “Yes.”

They were seated in Muske’s office in the West Wing.

“And the suspended analyst,” Muske said. “Laramie. Appears she ain’t bad at this.”

Ebbers had already known Laramie to be quite an analyst, for reasons unrelated to the current predicament.

“Agreed,” he said.

Muske looked at Ebbers across his desk. The national security advisor cut a leaner form but otherwise gave the impression somebody had performed a visual effect morphing together Colin and Michael Powell.

“You could have taken this straight to the president.”

“Could have,” Ebbers said.

“Probably would have helped repair your profile with him.”

“Might,” Ebbers said. “Though at the moment I’m not particularly concerned with that.”

“No?”

“No.”

“You’re concerned with the matter of”-Muske licked his thumb, leafing through one of the documents Ebbers had given him-“Mango Cay.”

“Yes.”

“And the missing dictators.”

“And the speed,” Ebbers said, “of any actions we might undertake in these matters.”

Muske thought about that.

“I suppose you mean, among other things, the president,” he said, “would have taken a while to schedule the meeting once you contacted him.”

“At which point,” Ebbers said, “once he’d read those reports, or heard me out, he’d have contacted you.”

Muske inclined his head. “And you figure I would then have…”

“Called the secretary of defense to request a navy reconnaissance team be dispatched to investigate the island where the missing dictators were photographed.”

Muske nodded.

“Be damned,” he said, “if you didn’t save yourself twelve or thirteen hours.”

“If not a whole day.”

Muske said, “Give me a minute,” punched the intercom on his phone, and when the voice of his assistant floated from the speaker, he said, “Could you get Wally on the horn please.”

Ebbers knew Wally to be Walter Parke, the secretary of defense. He listened to Muske’s conversation with Parke, in which it was decided that the nearest navy vessel equipped with a marines recon squad would be redirected to Mango Cay.

Muske hung up and Ebbers stood.

“You don’t mind,” Ebbers said, “I’ve got a little family business to tend to.”

Muske rose and shook Ebbers’s hand.

“Give my regards to Deputy Gates,” Muske said.

Cooper’s call from the deck of his boat had been to an extension at the Pentagon.

When a thick female voice with a Louisiana lilt answered with the words, “Admiral Sullivan’s office,” Cooper identified himself and said that he would need to be connected to the admiral immediately.

“Chop-chop,” he said.

After a stretch of blank air, the secretary said that she would check whether Admiral Sullivan was available. In fewer than five seconds, the crisp, reserved voice of Robert C. Sullivan, Admiral, USN, punched into Cooper’s right ear.

“What do you want?”

Sullivan had the acronym CINCLANTFLT affixed to the tail end of his rank. Sullivan hadn’t always been commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and in fact had spent some time in Cooper’s neck of the woods a little over a decade ago. He’d been the captain of a destroyer pulling regular calls in Puerto Rico, Guantánamo Bay, and St. Thomas, and during his stops at these various ports, Sullivan, who was married with three then-teenage children, had been prone to frequenting local massage parlors. The former captain made sure that he cultivated a reputation as a generous tipper, provided, of course, the services were sufficient to warrant the gratuity. The menu offered to Sullivan at these parlors always included happy endings, and Sullivan had been happy enough to lose count somewhere between four and five hundred sexual encounters, a hundred bucks a pop plus the tip. Cooper had always been curious whether Sullivan’s wife ever asked her hubby why he’d withdrawn so much cash during his tours of duty.

Cooper had occasionally visited such establishments himself, mainly in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas. During his visits, he’d come to note some familiar faces among the clientele out in the waiting rooms. Accordingly, he came to see the shops as a lucrative opportunity to build his list. He found that for a small fee, for instance, the proprietors of the various parlors were more than willing to install an automatic digital camera in each therapy room, and even agreed to handle the arrangements for monthly delivery of the data files to Road Town One-Hour Photo for convenient printing.

On the occasional night under the stars on the porch of his bungalow, Cooper would peruse the inventory of photographs, and found, to his delight, that many clients of the St. Thomas and San Juan massage parlors happened to work for such interesting organizations as the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Senate, 354 of the Fortune 500, the FBI, CIA, Russian military intelligence, and, as in Sullivan’s case, the navy.

One autumn morning, Cooper had landed at Washington National, driven to Annapolis, and telephoned then rear admiral Robert C. Sullivan at home. He introduced himself as a lobbyist for a PAC seeking higher military budgets, offered to buy Sullivan a lunch, and Sullivan took him up on the offer the following day. At lunch, Cooper ordered a cheddar bacon burger and a Bass Ale, waited for the burger and Sullivan’s chicken parmesan risotto to arrive, then slid a pair of eight-by-ten black-and-white prints across the table.