Another involuntary nod came quickly from Keeler.

“The guy in Venezuela,” he said. “He said he came ‘on behalf of Ernesto Borrego.’”

Cooper took this in. The name didn’t mean anything to him.

“Actually he didn’t say ‘Borrego,’” Keeler said. “He called him by his nickname-El Oso Blanco, I think it was. Or maybe El Oso Polar-I can never remember which.”

Cooper didn’t need Keeler’s translation of what followed.

“You name the language,” Keeler said, “but anyway, they call him ‘The Polar Bear.’ Good luck reaching the guy who came down to the dock-I’ll give you his pager, but he was a messenger, nothing more. You want to know who arranged this thing, it’s Ernesto Borrego-the Polar Bear, or whatever the fuck. I’ve worked with his people before. He’s into a lot of shit down there.”

Keeler gave Cooper the messenger’s pager number, and Cooper stored the digits in the part of his brain the many years of bourbon hadn’t yet destroyed.

“What about in Naples,” Cooper said. “Anybody there?”

Keeler shook his head.

“No,” he said, “only Borrego. That fuck. And you don’t need to pull any Abu Ghraib shit on me, man. That’s all I know.”

“Catch,” Cooper said, and tossed his boxy little satellite phone over the top of the Plexiglas shield. Keeler caught it, regarded the thing, then looked at him.

“Your phone call,” Cooper said.

Keeler didn’t waste any time. He punched out a number, waited for the assistant to get his lawyer, then ran through a half dozen issues without worrying whether Cooper was listening in. Then he broke the connection and threw the phone back over the shield.

Cooper caught it, stood, and knocked on the hallway door. Within four or five minutes the door chunked open and the guard who had brought him to the room showed up to escort him out.

He turned to Keeler.

“Live slow,” he said.

Just before the door closed behind him, he heard Keeler say, “Whatever,” and then the door was locked down again and Cooper headed back out into the sunshine.

8

Forty seconds after Julie Laramie showed up for work, she was asked to leave. This was not an uncommon event, since her boss, the newly appointed deputy director of intelligence, had carefully fostered his reputation as a combination absentminded professor and introvert and, befitting his reputation, routinely “forgot” he’d been asked to participate in certain meetings. Malcolm Rader’s senior staff-of which Laramie was the ranking member-got to do the honors.

Laramie had booted up her desktop but not yet sat down when Rader shuffled into her brand-new private office and handed her a slip of paper. He offered an apology for the late notice, then asked her to attend a meeting at the address written on the slip:

101 INDEPENDENCE AVE, WESTON ROOM (3C)

“Senate-mandated interagency intel session,” he said. Laramie knew there to be plenty of this sort of meeting in the aftermath of the findings of the 9/11 Commission.

And that brought her to now-grumbling at Rader’s feigned absentmindedness from the confines of her car. By not telling her about the meeting the night before, he’d already made her nearly an hour late.

From the C Street exit off I-395 she made her way to First, inferring that 101 Independence meant the corner of First. She drove past her destination twice without seeing it, repeatedly scanning the numbers on the block of historical buildings along one side of Independence Avenue until she realized why the address had sounded familiar: because she’d been here before. Turning her glance from one side of the street to the larger building across the way, she observed where Rader had sent her. Staring at Laramie in its full-block glory-While you, she thought, search fruitlessly for some office building that doesn’t exist-stood the massive building with the address of 101 Independence Avenue.

It was one of three similar structures that, when taken together, were more commonly known as the Library of Congress.

She felt a swell of disquiet as she found a distant on-street parking spot for her Volvo. Tugging at the parking brake, she saw that it was almost ten-fifteen-seventy-five minutes late. It took her another six minutes to make her way through the entrance of the James Madison Building and exhaust her own resources in the vain search for a sign suggesting the whereabouts of the Weston Room.

At that point she gave up and approached one of the information desks in the lobby, where a middle-aged male librarian was camped out behind the counter.

“Any chance,” Laramie said, “there’s a place called the Weston Room within a couple miles of here?”

She offered the message slip as a visual aid, and though she smiled as she did it, Laramie had lost all interest in pleasantries. She was more interested in taking some Extra-Strength Tylenol, or perhaps eating some breakfast, which she’d skipped in order to make it to her office at a reasonable time following a longer-than-usual morning run. In the wake of her battle with fellow commuters on I-395, she’d begun to wonder whether somebody at the Starbucks that marked the starting point on her jogs had decided to torture her with decaf.

Her head was killing her.

The librarian smiled flatly, his eyes dead and unpleasant behind the lines that creased his face when he smiled. He pointed to the great arching hallway to Laramie’s right.

“There’s a stairwell past the Madison tablets at the end of the hall,” he said. “Take it to the third floor-that’s the ‘3’ in the ‘3C’ on your note. Then you’re going to follow the signs to the screening room, which you will pass on your way to the stacks on the C Street side of the building-‘C.’ When you get to the back corner of the floor, you’ll need to look around, since there isn’t a sign except right beside the door. The plaque there will tell you you’ve reached the right place. The Weston Reading Room.” He returned the message slip with another courtesy smile.

“It’s only a little over a mile,” he said.

Laramie would have appreciated the joke had it not been for her growing hunger problem. She thanked the man with the skin-deep smile, started across the lobby, then thought of something and came back.

“One more thing,” she said. “Has anyone else asked for directions to the Weston Room today?”

The librarian thought for a moment before shaking his head no.

“What about, um, normally? Is it ever booked by outside groups for meetings?”

“Don’t think so,” he said.

She thought about his answers on her way down the hall, and after a climb up two flights of stairs and ten minutes of stack wandering, spotted the librarian’s promise of a plaque beside a door. She decided she was literally approaching a mile, or more, from the lobby, but there it was nonetheless-a brass plaque with the words WESTON READING ROOM tacked onto the wall beside the open arch of a doorway. According to her watch, she was now almost ninety minutes late.

Laramie came over to the doorway and stood out of the line of vision of anyone who might be in the room. She listened for a moment and heard nothing-no voices; no shuffling of papers.

She decided there was no conceivable way some “Senate-mandated interagency intel session” was currently taking place in the Weston Room. She considered that Malcolm Rader would not willingly, or even unwittingly, send her into some kind of trap; she couldn’t even think what form of trap would be set in the Weston Room anyway, outside of the evident sex-crime potential found in the quiet corners of any huge library. And Laramie-along with the pepper spray buried in her purse, anyway-could handle herself.

No-Laramie decided Rader had known exactly where, and for what purpose, he was sending her, and this meant a couple of things. First, it meant there was somebody in the Weston Room waiting for her-provided the person, whoever it was, had been willing to stick around for upward of two hours beyond the designated meeting time. Second, she thought, whoever’s in there is somebody Rader-your boss-answers to.