“I’m the one who had the drop on you, remember?”

“Then why haven’t you just arrested me?”

“Because I’d rather do this off the record for now.”

“Why?”

“Look, I know who you are. Or what, anyway. You’ve got spook written all over you.”

Ben couldn’t help smiling. “I could say the same about you, you know.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Funny. I know you’re CIA. Could have been DIA, maybe, but I know they’re not involved in this thing.”

Interesting that she would assume that. Well, Hort told him the CIA would be conducting its own off-the-books investigation, trying to beat the FBI to the tapes. Looked like the Bureau was aware of the problem, too.

He felt a momentary unease. These missing tapes were big. Maybe the biggest thing he’d ever worked on. A lot of players were after them, maybe for a lot of different reasons. A part of him wondered why all these agencies were circling one another the way they were, and the thought was as unfamiliar as it was uncomfortable. He was accustomed to thinking in terms of who. And when. And where. And how. But why? For the second time in as many days, he reminded himself that why was someone else’s problem.

“What are you, Ground Branch?” she said. “You’re former military. I can tell by the way you move.”

“Yeah? Well, I took a look at you and couldn’t tell anything. Until you were pointing a gun at me.”

She smiled. “That’s right. No one ever sees me coming.”

An unprofessional double entendre popped into Ben’s mind and some vestigial sense of judgment saved him from giving it voice.

“I’ll bet they don’t,” he said, keeping it neutral.

“So don’t blame yourself too much.”

“I’ll get over it.”

They sat in silence for a moment, watching each other, and Ben knew she was evaluating him the way he was her.

“All right,” he said, “so why off the record?”

She smiled just the tiniest bit, and he realized she’d been using the silence to draw him out. Damn, he had to stop underestimating women.

“Because I’ve never seen interagency cooperation worse than what we have on this case. Not even compared to what I’ve heard it was like before 9/11. And look what all that distrust and rivalry caused back then. When we don’t work together, Americans die. It’s that simple, but you people never seem to wake up to it.”

“‘You people’? What about your side?” Weird to suddenly find himself pretending to be an FBI guy pretending to be a CIA guy, but he went with it.

“Oh, there’s plenty of blame to go around, I’m sure. But we’re getting next to zero from the Agency on this one. We had to threaten a subpoena just to get a few records. And your presence at Wheeler’s house confirms you’ve been holding back. If you know something about her, if she’s relevant, why haven’t you told us?”

“Well, it’s not like you told us, either.”

“The only reason my team was staking out Wheeler’s house in the first place is because the Bureau thinks she’s a dead end. If they thought she was important, someone else would have been assigned.”

“You mean you, Bob, and Drew aren’t the A-team?”

She cocked an eyebrow again. “You keep up the sarcasm,” she said, her voice sweet, “you might get smacked.”

“I don’t know. That might be nice.”

She went to take a sip of coffee. Halfway to her mouth, she snapped the cup toward him. Hot coffee hit him in the face. He shot to his feet, spluttering and wiping his eyes.

“What the fuck?” he said.

He looked around. A few patrons were staring, but quickly glanced away.

“Oh, what, did I not smack you the way you were hoping?” she said.

He wiped his face and flung coffee droplets from his palms. “You’ve got nerve, sweetie, I’ll give you that.”

“Sit your ass down and recover your pride. Unless you want me to school you again.”

He sat down, his ego smarting much worse than his face. “I like when you get all ghetto-talk on me. Really, it’s sexy.”

“Oh, a little racist patter to go with the sexist. You trying to bore me to death now? You think I haven’t heard it all before, mostly from people a lot more clever than you?”

Goddamn it, she was right. She’d won the round. Now he was just being an asshole.

“Well,” he said, “you were right. That’s twice I didn’t see you coming.”

She smiled, and despite her evident amusement there was something gentle and even forgiving in her eyes. “I told you. Now listen. I like your dimples but I don’t have time to flirt with you. I’m not here to play games.”

“Yeah? What do you have in mind instead?”

“A little word association exercise to start with, to establish our bona fides. You ready?”

“Sure,” he said, not knowing where she was going.

“Detainees.”

Ah. Now he understood.

“Interrogations,” he said.

She nodded. “Now we’re making progress. Videotapes.”

“Missing.”

“Diamonds.”

“A hundred million U.S. ”

“Bingo.”

They were quiet for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We’re both looking for the same thing.”

“Exactly. And the brick wall your people are throwing up is going to make it impossible for either side to find it.”

“Then tell me what you need,” Ben said, hoping to learn more from the questions than he was willing to provide with answers.

“I need Larison.”

“Larison’s dead.”

“He’s supposed to be dead, yes.”

“What makes you think he’s not?”

“Look, the only thing we could get from CIA were some records, probably incomplete, on who had access to what we’re looking for. I was up for two nights straight cross-referencing the data. A black ops guy named Larison, deceased, had the access. I asked the Agency and they stonewalled me. That told me I was on to something. I told my superiors we needed to look into it. How sure are we this guy is dead? And even if he is, maybe he had an accomplice who got the tapes before Larison died. They all blew me off. They’re all looking for an analyst, trying to adapt their serial killer profiling tools to predict the kind of personality that would do something like this. And let me tell you, once an orthodoxy takes hold at the Bureau? It’s like religion, nothing’s going to shake it. So they told me fine, you want to stake out a dead guy’s widow’s house? Go right ahead. They gave me Bob and Drew, who you might have noticed aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and shooed me away. They were just glad to get me out of their hair.”

Well, Hort had been wrong about another agency not getting curious about Larison. He’d read the Bureau right, it seemed, he just hadn’t known about this tenacious woman.

“Why didn’t you interview her yourself, then?” he said.

“I was going to. But first I wanted to watch her. See if someone like you happened to show up.”

“Might have cost you time. Pretty big gamble.”

“Not so big, really. Because here you are. So what did she tell you?”

“Not much.”

“You’re lying.”

Well, it felt like he was lying, but technically he was afraid he might be telling the truth. “She might have told me one thing that was useful. I’m going to check it out now. Leave me alone for a while and I’ll let you know what I turn up.”

“That’s your idea of interagency cooperation? I knew you were CIA.”

“Look, I’m under a lot of pressure. It’s the best I can do right now.”

“Fine. You can explain while I’m booking you in the Orlando field office.”

“You want to know something, Paula? I like you. You’re smart and you’ve got balls. But if you make a move to arrest me, you’re going to wind up like your buddies Bob and Drew. The only difference might be that with you, I could feel bad about it after.”

She watched him for a moment, amused or seething he couldn’t tell.

“You’re right,” she said, with that sweet, soothing tone that to him was beginning to sound like a rattlesnake’s tail. “You’re a hard man. Even if I arrested you, I bet I couldn’t get you to cooperate. Guess I’ll just have to interview Wheeler myself. When she mentions someone has already been to see her, I’ll say, ‘Really? That’s awful. Who was he? Did he tell you he was FBI?’ ’Cause I know you didn’t just waltz into her house and tell her you were CIA. ‘He did? No, ma’am, he wasn’t FBI. I don’t know who he was, we’ve never heard of him. But impersonating an FBI agent is a crime punishable by no less than ten years in a federal penitentiary. I’d like to assist you in registering a complaint with the Bureau so we can conduct a formal investigation into who this man could be. We’ll need to release a description to the media, too.’ That kind of thing.”