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  “What did you mean by ‘Lie Detector’?” Laramie said.

  There we go.

  “I mean,” Cooper said, “you have a way of seeing past the surface.”

  Laramie didn’t say anything for a minute, Cooper wondering whether the silence stemmed from indifference, distraction, annoyance, or something else.

  “The drinking thing,” she said. “That’s what you’re talking about. That I knew you’d been drinking.”

  “What’s making you burn the midnight oil?”

  “Nothing I’d be permitted to tell you, of course.”

  “Maybe I could help.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Cooper waited.

  “Even if you could,” she said, “I’d probably refuse your sage advice and do things my own way, making decisions guaranteed to flush my career down the toilet.”

  “Professor Eddie,” Cooper said. “Professor Eddie gives you advice and you don’t take it.”

  “Yes. Mr. Lie Detector.”

  “Was he right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, was it good advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t take it.”

  “No. Listen-what can I help you with?”

  Cooper thought for a moment.

  “Not sure,” he said.

  The road noise on the other end of the line evaporated. Cooper heard the yank of an emergency brake, the ding-ding of the car telling Laramie the door was open with her keys in the ignition, the jangling of keys and slamming of a door.

  “So I’m home,” she said.

  “Tell me about the memo.”

  “What do you want me to tell you about it?”

  He heard more jangling of keys, a door opening and closing. He imagined Laramie turning on the light as she came in. He found he couldn’t picture either her or her house. Maybe she had an apartment. Condo-a salad person would own a condominium.

  “It came from something you found,” Cooper said. “As with every widely distributed Agency memo, it made a generic statement which obviously didn’t reflect what you found, but which came from something you found nonetheless. What was it you found?”

  “What do you care?”

  “The long hours you’re clocking have something to do with your discovery?”

  Laramie stayed quiet and so did Cooper. The chill from the car’s air conditioner, Cooper sitting there in the Taurus, felt as if it had frozen the cartilage beneath his kneecaps. Nonetheless he could still feel the sweat oozing from his back, causing him to stick, like a suction cup, to the seat.

  Laramie said, “I found something, and I’m looking for something more, but I’m not finding the something more I’m looking for. Actually I found a little something more, but I’m not finding anything else.”

  “That’s vague.”

  “I can’t talk about this.”

  “I’m cleared higher than the head of your department, Laramie.”

  “Well that’s very impressive,” she said, “but isn’t the issue.”

  “No?”

  “I’m not-”

  “Ah,” Cooper said.

  “Ah?”

  “You’re not supposed to be working on what you’re working on, are you?”

  Laramie hesitated.

  “Fuck them,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Tough talk,” Laramie said. “You know, Professor, ‘fuck them’ isn’t the kind of advice professors usually give.”

  Cooper heard a few rustling noises. Keys being dropped somewhere. And maybe, way in the background, the sound of feet kicking off shoes.

  Then Laramie sighed, the sigh loud in his ear with Cooper busy straining to hear what she was up to.

  “Look,” she said, “I analyze satellite intelligence. I found an unscheduled military exercise in the province they’ve assigned me in China. Shandong. The base there has mobilized and added troops in sufficient numbers to indicate there are plans in store for the real-world version of the exercise. The simulation I saw was a sea-to-land assault.”

  “Taiwan.”

  “That was my deduction too,” she said. “But perhaps you’re not aware of the recent strides we’ve made in Sino-American relations.”

  “No,” Cooper said, “I’m not.”

  “Suffice to say that if you were to write an internal Agency report documenting the deduction to which we just came, you might get a reprimand from pretty high up the chain of command.”

  Cooper thought, Gates, but didn’t say anything.

  “The reason I’m not officially working on what I’m working on is a little more complicated. I’m a China analyst. I know we’re growing our relationship with the PRC; it’s happening precisely due to the ideological makeup of the State Council. I know that plans for the annexation of Taiwan don’t fit the profile of eight, or even nine, of the eleven council members. I do realize the likely situation is that a couple of the most extreme vice premiers are doing it on their own. Or not alone, at least internationally speaking. So I check around and find the same thing going on in another country.”

  “Where?”

  “North Korea. And superanalyst Julie Laramie’s knee-jerk concluding hypothesis? A multinational ‘rogue faction’ exists. I believe it is possible that the members of the faction are jointly planning independent military actions, each hostile to U.S. interests.”

  Cooper digested this for a moment. “Sounds like a reasonable hypothesis,” he said.

  “Fortunately-or unfortunately-depending on whether I’m looking at it from the perspective of national security or personal job security-I’ve been checking other countries for similar exercises and seem to be finding zilch.”

  “Burning the midnight oil.”

  “Burning my career to a crisp. And by the way, if they didn’t have enough to go on to pink-slip me already, this phone call ought to wrap things up nicely.”

  Cooper thought he heard a cork thuk gently from a bottle.

  “Cell phone conversations are more labor-intensive to review,” he said. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “You don’t remember the cold war then.”

  “You must be joking. I’ve studied-”

  “When the wall came down, you were what, eleven? Go back another decade or so. Around when you were born.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Soviet Union was beating our pants off. They had fifty, sixty countries lined up, the Comintern’s revolutionary brotherhood, ready to gang-tackle us. You know how we won?”

  “Are you going to give me a Ronald Reagan speech?”

  “They ran out of money, and we didn’t. They couldn’t keep funding the brotherhood that had signed up for the revolutionary gravy train.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then Laramie laughed. She laughed pretty hard. Hard enough so that it took her a couple minutes to settle down.

  “No kidding, Columbo,” she said, finally.

  Cooper frowned.

  “My dad used to say that-‘No kidding, Columbo.’ I’m an analyst, mystery man. I already thought to select the countries I was checking based on ideology. If I can be so bold as to presume that’s the advice you’re suggesting I follow.”

  “Well-”

  “I’m in the midst of examining SATINT from a handful of Marxist-Leninist, socialism-espousing, or otherwise anti-American, capitalism-hating countries for similar military exercises. But I can only review so much of the world per week-at some point I need to know where to look, and even then it’s still the needle-in-the-haystack thing, presuming there’s a needle to find in the first place. My one semidiscovery is in Yemen, where there is a broad troop buildup by the rebels in the southern part of the country. They’re led by a terrorist you may know of-nickname’s the Arabian Bull-dog-and they want to secede. This, however, pretty much reflects exactly what’s been goi
ng on in that pocket of the world at least once per decade for the past fifty years. Conclusion? My hypothesis is bullshit. My bosses are burying my findings because they’re wiser than I.”

  Cooper sat there, stuck to the seat, thinking for a moment.

  “You know,” he said, “and some of us can speak from experience on this-one thing most of your bosses are not is wise. In fact, I can think of one of them in particular who happens to be a horse’s ass. And about as wise as a horse’s ass too, while we’re at it.”

  Cooper saw the door open across the street. Jim came out hurriedly, a protesting Rhonda in tow. He looked down at the in-dash clock. It said 12:33.

  “Gotta run, Lie Detector,” he said. “Go easy on the Chardonnay.”

  It was a guess, but Cooper took the lack of any reply before the click when Laramie hung up as affirmation of the guess. He wondered if she’d been smiling as she broke the connection-Cooper the fellow lie detector, figuring her out.

  Jim didn’t bother to wait for the cab he’d presumably called for Rhonda but instead simply left her on the stairs, strolled over to his van, gunned the engine, and pulled out.

  Figuring he might need the help if Jim had any excitement planned, Cooper had borrowed from a bit he’d seen in the movie Chinatown and busted one of Jim’s taillight covers a few minutes after the night’s first pager run. With the added luxury of the naked white bulb shining from the rear of the minivan, Cooper let Jim pull out and get a good way out ahead before he fell in behind. Once they hit the main drag Cooper stayed about a half mile back, easily able to see the beacon of the busted taillight up the road apiece.

  He tailed Jim into one of downtown Kingston’s worst slums, about thirty minutes from the Belle Acres love nest. Jim drove around for a while, seemingly aimless, before parking his minivan in an alley. Cooper pulled the Taurus against the curb across the street from the alley, parking at an angle, so that he could see the van itself, but that was about it. He saw from the sign at the corner of the alley that they were on East Queen Street. Jim exited the van and walked out of the alley and onto East Queen, Cooper getting a good look at him as he passed under the splash of the streetlights, that bright red hair of his cut high-and-tight.

  There were a couple of nightclubs and some shops on this segment of East Queen. Long since closed for the night, most of the shops were protected by the usual articulated metal cage doors; there were enough winos and junkies sleeping in the storefront alcoves that Cooper lost count trying to figure out how many were living here.

  Jim went up the street, away from Cooper, and seemed to decide on a particular alcove, Cooper seeing it was a pawnshop. He disappeared into the pocket of darkness and was in there long enough for Cooper to think Jim might have shaken him when a tiny orange flame flared from the alcove. After that a similar orange glow appeared from time to time. This went on for a while, maybe twenty-five minutes, Jim having a smoke under the awning of a pawnshop at one-thirty in the morning on one of the worst streets in all of Kingston.

  Then Jim came out of the alcove. Cooper watched as he flicked the remnants of his last cigarette into the street, turned, and began to walk with a deliberate stride back down the street, moving in the direction of the van. Cooper was ready for a confrontation, figuring Jim would easily have made him from the alcove, Cooper sitting in a gleaming Ford Taurus with four hundred miles on the odometer in a neighborhood littered with vehicle carcasses. Jim didn’t come his way, though, and instead paused on the other side of the street and looked around the interior of another alcove from his spot on the sidewalk.

  Cooper realized what it was Jim had in mind just before he did it.

  Turning suddenly into the alcove, Jim leaped on the bum sleeping against the wall and unleashed a series of savage, pistonlike kicks into the man’s head. The attack was silent, brutal, and quick. Once the violence subsided, Jim checked his victim over, grabbed him by his hair to take a look, confirming the knockout. Then he threw the wino over his shoulder, shifted his posture to get comfortable with the weight, and carried the comatose bum back to the van. Cooper had the urge to get out of the Taurus, walk across the street, and kick Jim’s teeth in, but he knew it wouldn’t do him, or his twice-dead client, any good. He still had to find out where Jim was headed, why, and to see whom. Among other things.

  Jim drove a few miles on a main thoroughfare before making another turn. Cooper was completely lost, but he discovered this didn’t matter, since Jim wasn’t going anywhere-he parked on a quiet side street and simply remained inside the van. After a while, Cooper saw him duck into the back; after another while, he returned to smoke another cigarette in the front seat before leading Cooper onto the highway.

  At 3:11 by Cooper’s dashboard clock, Jim exited the turnpike. Cooper burned some fuel catching up as the Mitsubishi vanished from the through-way, and as he followed Jim’s route off the exit ramp he saw a sign displaying the words CANNERY and MUSEUMS. He caught the broken taillight around a corner between what appeared to be a pair of abandoned warehouses before the minivan’s brake lights flared and Cooper could see Jim easing the Mitsubishi out onto a dock.

  Cooper parked the Taurus and got out. He could smell the Caribbean immediately. They’d come to a run-down waterfront district where some of the buildings had been preserved and repainted as museums, others either abandoned or used anonymously, streaks of grime and rust evident along their corrugated metal siding. Two piers stretched out into the bay; rows of creosote-laden pilings supported the fat buildings the way giraffe legs might hold up an elephant. Cooper could see the van out on the first pier, the southernmost, so he found his way out to the end of the other.

  Cooper heard the thrum of an approaching engine and pegged it, without being able to see the boat, for a Bertram or a Chris-Craft, Cooper guessing at least a forty-five-footer. He found a small depression in the planks of the pier, a place where he could sit, adequately camouflaged, and still enjoy an unobstructed view of Jim. Jimbo, he saw, was leaning against the front grille of the minivan, having another smoke. Cooper wondered whether it was tobacco or dope he’d been smoking along the way.

  The boat approached the dock sideways, giving the pilings a brawny bump, Cooper thinking the boat’s captain couldn’t keep a freight train on railroad tracks. It looked a little bigger than he’d thought, maybe fifty feet, but definitely a Chris-Craft like he’d guessed; it was hard to tell, given the boat’s severe weathering. What he could see, even in the half-moon darkness, was that the hull was swollen with barnacles and stained with blooms of rust.

  A thin white guy wearing foul-weather gear and a baseball cap emerged from the rear of the boat. He secured the lines, climbed a ladder that Cooper hadn’t noticed was connected to the pier, and pulled himself up onto the dock. He and Jim came together, Jim still smoking; there was conversation which Cooper had no way of hearing, and then the white guy went back to the edge of the dock and waved. A second man, also white, appeared in the back of the boat holding something small and dark. He tossed it up to the guy on the dock and went back inside the boat. Cooper could see that he had thrown his companion a canvas athletic bag.

  The first white guy handed the bag to Jim, who unzipped it, checked inside, then zipped it closed again and tossed the bag into the minivan through the open passenger-side window. Jim then opened the rear hatch and proceeded to remove the wino, now bound with duct tape. Jim carried him to the edge of the dock, where the first white guy, now positioned on the ladder, grabbed hold. Struggling to hold the wino’s near-dead weight, he climbed down the ladder to the boat. His companion came out again and helped take the wino into the cabin.

  Then the two of them were back inside the boat, Jim was behind the wheel of the minivan, and everybody left.

  Cooper stayed where he was for a moment, not really sure whether he wanted to get up at all. He thought about what this meant, presuming he could extrapolate-or whatever it’s called, he thought, when it’s the opposite of extrapolation-and apply this odd turn of e
vents to recent history. If he could, then perhaps Marcel S., once-dead and then exhumed and revived, had been delivered somehow to Jim, who then passed him on, as with the wino, in exchange for whatever was in the canvas bag. Maybe to the same pair of white guys in the Chris-Craft; maybe not. It seemed unlikely-and, given the rest of Cap’n Roy’s mystery ride, too easy-for the owners of the boat he’d just seen here at Cannery Row to have procured both the wino and Marcel from ol’ Jimbo, but it was certainly possible. This logic therefore made it worth his while to make a call he’d been thinking about making for one hell of a long time anyway.

  In the meantime, though, there was something he needed to do.

  He caught up to the minivan just shy of the highway on-ramp, using some good old-fashioned American horsepower to overtake it. Once he had, Cooper cut in front of the van and stood on the brake pedal, giving Jim a choice: lock his own brakes or ram headlong into the Taurus. Jim hit the brakes.

  Cooper, who was already out of the Taurus, was able to get over to the driver’s-side door of the minivan before Jim had figured out what was going on. When he got there, he smashed his fist through the window, grabbed Jim by the neck, and slammed his head against the steering wheel. Jimbo’s eyes rolled back in his head, pretty much the way Cooper had seen albacores’ eyes do when you whacked the suckers with the deep-sea charter-issue kill-stick. Cooper then opened the door, reached over, unbuckled Jim’s seat belt, got hold of the back of Jim’s sweat suit top, and pile-drove him through the front windshield. He pulled Jim’s head back inside, raking his face through the jagged glass, then bashed Jimbo’s forehead against the steering wheel until his arm hurt, Cooper losing count of the number of times Jim’s bleeding face hit the hard plastic of the wheel after maybe twenty whacks.

  Winded, he hoisted Jim, long since comatose, out of the minivan and over his shoulder, then loaded him into the trunk of the Taurus. He crawled inside the van and found the duct tape, came back, and mummified Jim about the way Jim had done with the wino.

  Consulting the map provided by the rental agency, Cooper took the Taurus to the front entrance of the U.S. embassy on Oxford Road. He pulled up to the barricade blocking car bombers from direct access to the front stairs, rolled down his window, and showed the stone-faced M.P. standing there his fraudulent DEA identification card. He told the M.P. there was a man tied up in his trunk who’d gone AWOL and was wanted on fifteen counts of first-degree murder, requested that the guard return his car to Hertz when he had a chance, then got out of the Taurus and walked away.