“The Amish make ‘em — the cabinets, not the heaters. The heaters, the gooks make,” Buzz said. “Anyway, the fucking thing cranks out about a billion BTU’s. It’s like goddamn Miami Beach down here.”

“Nobody says gooks anymore, Buzz, unless they’re wearing robes and burning crosses.”

“Hey, I don’t need you schooling me on political correctness, Logan. I get all I need from the wife. She’s so liberal, she wears progressive lenses. That thing you asked me about, former co-workers checking out prematurely? You want the skinny or not?”

“Ready to copy.”

“I checked open-source databases on every name I could think of,” Buzz said. “You remember a guy named Rob Emerson, joined the group in early 2003?”

“Who?”

“Robbie Emerson. Went by ‘Herman Munster.’ Looked like he free-fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

Robbie Emerson. Herman Munster. A face floated faintly up from the swampy reaches of my prefrontal lobes. He’d left Alpha less than a month after I rotated in. The story I remembered was that he’d been cashiered for flunking a polygraph.

“He was a Ranger. Got the Silver Star in Mogadishu.”

“Not bad, Logan. At least we know you don’t got the Alzheimer’s. Anyway, the weekend before Echevarria gets it, Emerson drives into the desert outside Phoenix and eats his gun. That’s according to local law enforcement. His wife told some newspaper out there he had no reason to kill himself.”

His fall from grace, according to Buzz, began after Emerson and some Navy SEALs he’d been training with in Little Creek, Virginia, stopped off after work at a dive bar popular among the frogmen. He’d had a few beers and gotten cozy with a woman who worked as a receptionist in the Washington office of a European trade group that brokered international arms deals. The SEALs suspected that the woman, a Bulgarian, was a “floater,” someone used sporadically for intelligence gathering. Emerson had failed to report this contact during a later polygraph exam (those of us in Alpha were routinely polygraphed every six months). Echevarria, who’d been instrumental in bringing him into the group, defended Emerson, arguing that he was being railroaded — Emerson claimed he’d simply forgotten having met the woman. Moreover, there was no evidence he’d passed along any sensitive information of any kind to her — but the command staff didn’t want to hear it. He was stripped of his security clearance, relieved of duty and ultimately forced to retire. He’d bounced between civilian jobs, construction mostly, boasting to acquaintances that he didn’t have to work because he was secretly wealthy, before landing a part-time gig at a Home Depot in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale.

“Maybe it wasn’t suicide, like his wife says, but you sure as hell gotta wonder about his timing,” Buzz said. “Let’s say Robbie Emerson did get whacked. Then Echevarria gets whacked. Maybe we all should be watching our asses. I mean, it’s true what Goldfinger said: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.”

“It’s a sad day when lazy, butt-ugly, over-paid civil servants start quoting lines from movies and calling it operational doctrine, Buzz.”

“Who you calling over-paid?”

I told him about the murder of Gennady Bondarenko, and about being chased by the white Honda. I told him about the repeated hang-ups on my answering machine, and about the angry, dark-complected man who, according to Larry, had come looking for me at the airport.

“If it was me and I was dealing with all that shit, I’d be packing heavy,” Buzz said. “One primary weapon, one backup, some frags, and an AT-4, because nothing says I love you like a man-portable missile.”

“You should be writing your own advice column, Buzz. Call it, ‘Dear Miss Armed to the Teeth.’”

“Probably make more money than I’m making now.”

He’d already emailed me two news stories on the death of Robbie Emerson by the time we hung up.

Both stories had run in the online edition of the Arizona Republic. Neither mentioned Emerson’s record of military service. The first article described how police were investigating the discovery of an unidentified body found shot to death in the desert outside Scottsdale. The second article, posted two days later, offered more detail: A utility crew stringing digital cable line on a dirt road had discovered Emerson’s body slumped behind the wheel of his Chevy Silverado. Authorities believed he’d been dead less than twenty-four hours. A brief suicide note was recovered from the scene. The manager at the Home Depot where Emerson worked said he’d seemed upset the day before his death. Yet his widow insisted that he hadn’t killed himself. “He was about to be a grandfather,” Emma Emerson was quoted as saying.

Maybe Robbie Emerson died at his own hand, or not. Maybe his death had nothing to do with the murders of Echevarria and Bondarenko, or maybe it had everything to do with them. Yogi Berra once said that some things in life are too coincidental to be coincidence. Perhaps Robbie Emerson’s demise was one of those things. Or perhaps not. All I knew was that my afternoon, as usual, was free — plenty of time to make a few calls and play connect the dots.

I was about to contact Detective Czarnek and tell him what I’d learned when Eugen Dragomir showed up on his skateboard with a $5,000 check and said, “Let’s go flying.”

The check was drawn on an account from Zurich-based Massio Trust, Ltd. Among banks catering to the international uber-wealthy, Massio’s impeccable reputation for asset security and client confidentiality was nonpareil. Which, as any intelligence analyst worth his or her salt will tell you, made Massio Trust a financial institution of choice among certain organized crime operations, including several Russian mafia subsets. But I didn’t think much about it at that moment. Only rich men and fools look a gift horse in the mouth. I left my revolver in my desk.

After walking Eugin through our preflight inspection, we climbed into the Duck, got the engine going, and listened to the ATIS. The recording indicated that there was a TFR in effect with a thirty-mile radius just north of Rancho Bonita. I told the controller that we would be conducting training maneuvers well to the west, out over the ocean.

“What’s a TFR?” Eugin said.

“Temporary no-fly zone. It means the Vice President’s in town for the weekend.”

The veep and his wife were regulars to the Rancho Bonita area. An old friend of his from graduate school days who’d made good as a hedge fund manager owned a ranch up the coast with horses and a stocked bass pond, and the Second Family visited there often, accompanied by the press, Secret Service, and fully armed Air Force fighter jets that maintained a round-the-clock combat air patrol high overhead, ready to vaporize anything manmade that penetrated the restricted, thirty-mile zone accidentally or otherwise.

I had him taxi to the run-up area, then do an engine run-up to make sure everything was working properly. The tower cleared us for takeoff and we launched. Three minutes later, the controller said, “Resume own navigation, maintain appropriate VFR altitude.”

“Own nav, own altitude,” I radioed.

We were headed out to sea. Once we got up to 3,000 feet, I leveled off and showed Dragomir how to induce a stall, pulling the nose up, bleeding off the airspeed, until the Duck buffeted, pitched over and plummeted toward the waves below. I showed him how to push the yoke forward to break the stall while leveling the wings and adding power, then how to raise the nose to recover lost altitude. We climbed back up to 3,000 feet and did a couple of clearing turns. I said to Dragomir, “Your turn.”

Most students tense up when practicing how to recover from stalls. As the warning horn moans in their ears and the plane suddenly drops out from under them, many grit their teeth and close their eyes in terror. Some even barf. Not this kid. He was Right Stuff incarnate. Perfect recovery every time. We practiced slow flight and standard-rate turns. Again, his technique was perfect. I couldn’t help but be impressed.