Lateness can be a virtue or a sin.

Arrive late to a party, for instance, and that's fashionable. Arrive late for your own funeral and people envy your good fortune. But come late to a possible murder investigation and you have a career problem.

But nearly every problem has a solution, and I turned to the attractive lady in the brown and tan suit who was standing beside me and asked, "Come here often?"

"Hey, that's very funny." She was not laughing, or even smiling.

"It's my best line."

"Is it?"

"You'd be surprised how often it works."

"You're right," she observed. "I'd be surprised." She placed a hand over her mouth and laughed quietly, or maybe yawned.

I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. "Sean Drummond," then added less truthfully, "Special Agent Drummond. FBI."

"Bian Tran." She ignored my hand, and was trying to ignore me.

"Pretty name."

"Is it?"

"I like your outfit."

"I'm busy. Can't you make yourself busy?"

We were off on the wrong foot already. In all fairness, sharing a small space with a lovely lady and a fresh corpse does push charm and wit to a higher level. I directed a finger at the body on the bed. "It's interesting, don't you think?"

"I might choose a different adjective."

"Then let's see if we can agree on nouns-was it suicide or murder?"

Her eyes had been on the corpse since I entered the room, and for the first time she turned and examined me. "What do you think?"

"It sure looks like suicide."

"Sure does. But was it made to look that way by him… or somebody else?"

Funny. I thought that's what I had asked her.

I turned and again eyed the corpse. Unfortunately, a tall, plump forensic examiner was hunched over the body, mining for evidence, and all I could see was the victim's head and two medium-size feet; the territory between was largely obscured.

But here was what I could observe: The victim was male, late-fiftyish, neither ugly nor attractive, tall nor short, skinny nor fat, and so forth. An everyday Joe. A man with bland features and a gray brush cut, physically ordinary and entirely unmemorable.

It occurred to me that if you walked past him on the street or sat beside him on the subway, you would look right past or perhaps through him.

And there, I thought, was one putative motive for going either postal or suicidal-fatal anonymity. "How long have you been here?" I asked Ms. Tran.

"Thirty minutes, more or less." She was jotting notes in a small notebook. She shifted her shoulder and-accidentally, I'm sure- blocked my view of her notebook. She asked, "What about you?"

"Just arrived. How about a little help getting oriented?" What I failed to mention was why I was here in the first place, which had something to do with the victim's phone being tapped by people from the FBI, who were working with people from the CIA, who had overheard a phone call from a distressed lady to the local cops, reporting a corpse.

The victim was what is termed in the intelligence business a target of interest; was being the operative tense. Now he was an object of mystery, and in every mystery there are five basic questions. Who died was obvious, as was where, leaving the three questions I was sent here to figure out-when, how, and with any luck, why.

Nobody informed me why and in this business, don't ask. If you need to know, they'll tell you. Irritating, certainly, but there are valid and important reasons for this rule. The fate of our nation might depend on it, so you have to swallow your curiosity, avoid speculation, and get on with it.

Anyway, suspicion of espionage-that was my guess. I mean, the FBI and CIA don't even like or trust each other. They are the Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, except in cases of espionage, when the crap lands on both their doorsteps. Then you have two prima donnas sharing the same small stage, and we all know what that gets you.

Also worth noting, with the country at war-in Afghanistan and Iraq-espionage had become a more noteworthy matter than during the cold war, where spies mostly just gave up other spies, like homicidal incest. By all the spook thrillers and Hollywood flicks you'd think that was what the whole cold war thing was about. In truth, it was little more than the waterboys at a pro football game snapping towels at each other's butts. Entertaining, for sure: Ultimately, however, the successes were never as great, and the failures never as dire, as they sounded. The more serious stuff would be handled by the millions of armed troops glaring across the inter-German border; the genuinely serious issues by a pair of gentlemen with briefcases who could turn out everybody's lights.

Post-9/11, however, was a new world. Times change-espionage today meant falling towers, crushed nations, and soldiers' lives.

About that latter point, you can bet my interest was more than passing.

Which brings us to me-a newly promoted Army lieutenant colonel by rank, attorney by trade, Judge Advocate General Corps by branch, temporarily assigned to the CIA, though neither Ms. Tran nor the local cops were supposed to know any of that. The CIA is really into disguises, covers, and concealment. Inside the United States, usually this means we're impersonating other federal agencies, and you have to get your act straight. CIA people tend to be intelligent, clever, snide, and arrogant, and you have to suppress that. Feds tend to be intense Goody Two-shoes, wholesome, nosy, pushy, and obnoxious, so I was good to go on three out of five. I think it's fairly obvious which three.

Anyway, Ms. Tran had returned to ignoring me, so I asked her, "Are you going to help me out or not?"

"Why should I?"

"I'll make it worth your while."

"Will you? How?"

I smiled. "Afterward, you can take me to lunch, dinner, Bermuda, whatever."

She replied, without visible enthusiasm, "Let me think about it." Apparently she became distracted by something on the other side of the room, and she wandered away.

I should also mention that, at the moment, I was assigned to a small and fairly unique cell inside the CIA titled the Office of Special Projects, or OSP. About the only thing special about this cell that I can see is it gets the stuff nobody else wants-this job, for instance. In my view, it should be called the Office Where All the Bad Shit Gets Dumped, but the spooks are really into smoke and mirrors, so nothing is what it seems, which is how they like it.

Anyway, this office works directly for the Director of Central Intelligence, which has advantages, because we don't have a lot of bureaucratic hoops to jump through, and a big disadvantage, since there's nobody else to pin the screwups on, so it's a bit of a high-wire act.

Also, there are large and significant cultural differences between the clandestine service and the Army, and I was experiencing a few adjustment difficulties. I've been warned, in fact, that if I remove my shoe and speak into the heel again, I can look forward to a long overseas trip someplace that really sucks. These people need to lighten up.

Nor is it unusual for Army officers to be loaned, or, in military parlance, seconded to other government agencies. The idea, as it was explained to me, is we each bring something different to the table- different specialties, different mind-sets, different wardrobes-and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In an organization, the term for this is synergy, and in an individual it's called multiple personality disorder. I'm not really sure about the difference, but there it is.

But for reasons I have yet to understand, the Agency requested me, and for reasons I fully understood, my former Army boss was happy to shove me out the door, so you might say it seemed to work out for everybody; except perhaps me.