“Laramie,” he said.

Just like the first time, when she’d come into his gray cubicle during office hours and he’d known her name on sight. He came around to open the door for her, something she remembered he always remembered to do.

“Climb in,” he said, and she tossed her bag into the backseat and watched him come around. When he got in, he fastened his seat belt, started the car, and looked over at her. Laramie was thinking that she hated the way he buckled his seat belt when he said, “Remember a place called Sandbags?”

“Sure,” she said.

“I figured we’d start off with a little food.”

He worked the car out from behind a shuttle bus, using the left-hand blinker as he went. He always signaled when he changed lanes.

“Why not,” Laramie said.

Northwestern University Associate Professor Edwin Rothgeb kept the same little gray room he’d claimed as an office a dozen years ago, and maintained the same office hours he’d kept for a decade running-Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 8 to 10:30 A.M. Something Rothgeb liked to do, though, when it came to more substantive off-line discussions, was to set a meeting on a Saturday, early, when there wasn’t a student or faculty member in sight. For these sessions he held court in one of the big old classrooms in Scott Hall, where nobody would bother him.

Everything had been fine as they caught up on the drive over, Laramie asking Rothgeb about this year’s freshman class and telling him about the rigors of her Agency training program at Camp Peary. They’d kept the conversation going for the walk across the quad; Rothgeb unlocked the faculty entrance and let them into the big lecture hall, and they sat at the table in front of the blackboard and spread out the sandwiches.

Then Laramie asked him how things were going with Heather.

Rothgeb smiled, said that things were fine, took a bite of his Genoa salami sandwich, and didn’t say another word for the rest of the meal. Laramie ate her turkey sub and sipped on a Diet Snapple iced tea, trying in vain to think of something to say. At length, Rothgeb took his last bite, wiped his mouth with one of the brown paper napkins, and smiled the same way he had smiled when she’d asked him about Heather.

“I’m full,” he said, and adjusted his glasses. “Let’s have a look.”

Laramie reached into her bag and came out with two overstuffed manila file folders. When she handed them over, Rothgeb rolled up his wax paper wrapper, cleared everything but his root beer off to one side of the table, and, wordlessly, began reading.

Laramie stood.

“Better let you concentrate,” she said, and slipped out the door.

Remembering it was down by the other stairwell, Laramie found the bathroom. It smelled of ammonia, as though the janitor had scrubbed it the night before. When she emerged from the stall, she thought about the heavy reading Eddie had in store and decided she may as well head upstairs-have a look around.

When she got to the third floor she saw what she knew she’d see: the same bulletin board, the doors, closed this morning, the classrooms closed off behind them. She wandered down the hallway lit only by the natural morning light, the floor both shiny and dull, and came to a door. She stopped in front of it and stood there like a child. After a while she reached out, ran her hand across the strip of wood with his name on it. She felt the letters.

Ed Rothgeb.

Once, she’d gone in there, ostensibly to review some assigned reading, and hadn’t come out for a long while. She’d been in there for a long while many times before, mentor-pupil conversations stretching from minutes to hours, but not so long as during the time that came to mind. Laramie couldn’t remember now what it was that had turned the conversations from academic to personal, but she did remember the feeling those meetings gave her. Thinking the whole time that it probably wasn’t a good idea telling a professor the kind of things she was telling him, but since he always followed with another question, she would keep talking. And she watched his eyes watching her, those piercing blue eyes, the smartest eyes she’d ever seen, cautious behind the wire-rim eyeglasses, but piercing.

At some point he started telling her stories of his own, none of which she heard, all of it merging into one big stream of words, Laramie thinking then that if she could just keep him talking she could hear his voice some more and keep watching his mouth as it spoke. Then that Saturday meeting happened, a morning meeting that became an afternoon meeting. She remembered the way he leaned across the desk to touch her cheeks, to feel the heat in them, and Laramie closed her eyes and imagined his voice and his eyes and his mind wrapping entirely around her, and then she heard a stapler and a pair of books tumble to the floor and she felt his gentle lips on hers, and she opened her eyes and saw them, those piercing blue eyes, looking right back into hers, and the man she had thought about, four feet away but untouchable, touched her, and so she touched him. It took a while to build, Rothgeb being respectful, but when it happened that afternoon it happened on his desk, Laramie supposing because they had both thought of it happening that way.

Eddie Rothgeb was everything Laramie thought she had ever wanted in a man, and she told him so. He had helped her find her calling, helped her out of her shell, given her a sense of comfort and confidence she hadn’t found at home. To Laramie he was everything except courageous, the sensuous Eddie Rothgeb already locked inside his four-door-sedan marriage, Laramie too young and stupid to think about it that way with the temptation of the man before her in his office, feeling like he belonged to her.

Laramie let her fingers drop from his nameplate. She reached down, knowing what would happen but still unable to resist trying. She turned the doorknob.

It was locked.

She thought, Of course it is.

Laramie went back downstairs.

You’ve got something here,” he said, “or at least it’s likely you do. And you’ve conducted an astute analysis. But you didn’t come here to ask me if I think you’ve got something, or whether I think you’re good at what you do.”

Laramie watched him from one of the wooden chairs a couple rows back, the only student attending his lecture. She felt more comfortable now that they were talking about her documents instead of Heather Rothgeb.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

“You came to ask whether you should tell them you’ve got something here.”

“Yes.”

Rothgeb unclasped his hands, removed his eyeglasses, set the glasses on the table, leaned back in the chair, rubbed his face with both hands, and finished the act exactly the way she knew he would-by stroking his neat little beard with his right hand, sliding his thumb along one jawline and his index finger along the other. He retrieved the glasses from the table, placed them back on his face, and reclasped his hands.

“Actually,” he said, “I don’t think you came to ask that question at all.”

Laramie didn’t say anything.

“I know you, Laramie, so I’m aware that you’ve already made your decision. But let’s run through it anyway.

“You’ve shown me satellite photographs of a significant military operation, which appears to be either an ordinary war game, or, as seems more likely from its size, genuine preparations for an imminent invasion. These activities were unpublicized, and successfully executed either during total cloud cover or on a schedule designed to avoid what are supposed to be classified spy satellite schedules-at least they were successfully executed in secret until you decided to look a little closer. Image selections from alternate source satellites yielded a more complete view of the operation. In short, from all appearances, it’s a reasonable bet that an invasion is about to take place, possibly within months.”