He broke off another piece of doughnut but did not lift the piece to his mouth nor say anything else-an academic, lost in a sea of his own complex thoughts. Laramie, growing weary of the verbal fencing it took to get these guys to share what they were thinking, said, “And?”

“Well, we’ve never been good at stopping this. I’d love to recommend some sleeper-busting specialist I’ve met along the way, but either such experts retired along with the sleepers or I just don’t know the right people. Maybe whoever it is you’re working for now could track somebody down.”

Laramie spun the Styrofoam cup of coffee slowly between her hands, wondering idly how it was everybody seemed to know she wasn’t doing this for CIA.

“Well,” she said, “instead of tracking down any such specialist, the people you’re referring to decided to recruit…me. Though maybe they called me additionally, and they’re working with some other specialists separately. You never know.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t, do you?” He ate the broken-off piece of doughnut, which wasn’t much of a mouthful. “But your Benjamin Achar was similar to the Soviet sleepers, at least in the way they were rumored to have been positioned. Assuming he wasn’t some American ex-con running from a shadowy past and looking to emulate Timothy McVeigh, you’ll need to consider that he was trained in all things American. Mannerisms, accent, job skills, and so forth.”

“But not the inclination to buy a pickup truck,” Laramie said.

Rothgeb blinked but otherwise ignored her comment. “Point being, there would have to be a facility, or facilities, where Achar was trained. And unless they only had this one agent, it’d be logical for the trainers to need to cycle instructors through, and to put more than one student together for the training sessions.”

“An Americanization campus,” she said, and took a swallow of the bitter, undiluted coffee. “There was a novel written about that, wasn’t there?”

Rothgeb nodded. “Nelson DeMille. Maybe a check of satellite intel on terrorist encampments could yield a clue as to its whereabouts, presuming it exists in some visible place.”

“I think I’ve examined enough SATINT for ten lifetimes, but that isn’t a bad idea,” she said. “Wherever it is they trained is likely to have been abandoned long ago, though, isn’t it?”

“Because he’s been here for ten years? Still,” he said.

“Yeah. Still.”

She took another sip.

“How have you been,” she said, and thought, Now is when he clams up.

Rothgeb shrugged. It was an uncomfortable gesture for him to make, in that it was imprecise. Everything else, the man did with precision. The shrug came, she suspected, because he needed something to do while avoiding the question, without being too obvious about it.

“Just fine, I suppose,” he said. Coming dangerously close to the last of his diversions, he broke off another piece of doughnut, ate it, took a leisurely sip from his coffee, then said, “It’s our weak spot, you know.”

Laramie looked at him. “Sleepers, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“I would tend to agree we’re vulnerable,” she said, “but what do you mean?”

He ate his next-to-last bite.

“We still haven’t learned to adapt. The big bureaucratic machine engineered to battle the Soviets needed to redirect itself and focus on someone else, somebody specific. So once some new group hit the radar, the machinery targeted it: al-Qaeda. Palestinians. Internally, certain Arab-Americans or Arab immigrants, as you say. We mobilize the big, slow machinery, get set up to fight people who look like that, or come from there, and hope the power steering works.”

Laramie nodded absently.

“You think about the business of spying, though,” he said, “and it’s all about immersion. So here we are mobilizing to attack, while the smarter enemy is busy immersing themselves in our culture. Assimilating.”

Laramie watched his eyes and his mouth as he spoke. She remembered soaking up his words, and watching him say them, while she was immersed in her new life in Evansville. Now, listening to him rant on like the self-absorbed academic he was, Laramie wondered whether she’d made the right move in bringing him here. Maybe that was the real reason she’d stopped by the Krispy Kreme before bringing Rothgeb to the Flamingo Inn: maybe she wanted to make sure it wasn’t too stupid an idea. Adding a pompous blowhard to the mix might spur stimulating debate in their “war room,” but she had her doubts he would help them pinpoint strategies and action plans. Which is precisely what it was going to take-if there were anything at all to be done.

Too late now, Laramie. You brought him here, your guide retrieved him from the airport-you going to send him home already?

Besides-he’s already hit on something.

“You still read spy novels as much as you used to?” she said.

Rothgeb smiled neatly, the motion more compact and precise than the unwieldy shrug in which he’d earlier engaged.

“Aren’t as many good ones as there used to be,” he said. “But I still partake of the occasional best-seller.”

Laramie slipped the plastic lid back on her half-drunk cup of coffee.

“Then let’s head over to the Flamingo Inn,” she said. “You’re in for a treat.”

31

The velociraptor’s name was Jesus Madrid.

Madrid was currently functioning as interim business manager of Borrego Industries. As with his late boss, he worked with no pretense, but lived lavishly-there was, it seemed, a great deal of money to be made in the shipping and fulfillment industries.

At the end of each of the six days since Borrego’s disappearance, Madrid followed approximately the same luxurious routine-one he would follow on this day too. At the conclusion of the workday, Borrego’s driver chauffeured Madrid to the spa he and Borrego frequented, and Madrid did as he always did there: shower, hit the sauna, subject himself to a full-body deep-tissue massage, subject himself to twenty minutes of rapture with the masseuse who’d deeply massaged his tissue, shower again, and return to the car. He listened to a jazz playlist on an iPod nano in the back of the car, waited while the driver pulled into one of Borrego’s take-out joints to retrieve an order of spicy tuna sushi rolls for him before ferrying him home.

It was closing in on ten-fifteen when the driver, armed with the remote, opened the gate to Madrid’s estate and navigated the quarter-mile driveway that took them up the hill to the mansion. Madrid’s home was a misplaced English Tudor of just over eight thousand square feet featuring numerous amenities-seventeen plasma screens, for instance. As he had the night before, and the night before that, Madrid retreated to the master bedroom to change into his workout gear-black spandex pants; Asics running shoes; a tank top with BI SECURITY stenciled across the chest-then retrieved a bottle of Gatorade from the Sub-Zero fridge in the kitchen and came downstairs to his workout room.

In size and feel, the room resembled your average suburban health club, outfitted with a circuit of weight machines, barbells, dumbbells, the latest in cardio equipment, and one glaring exception from the norm: a floor and wall design aimed at re-creating, in miniature, the soccer pitch used by Madrid’s favorite team. The field was Old Trafford Stadium, the team Manchester United. The surface of the floor, painted with penalty and goal boxes and a midfield stripe, was covered wall to wall with the latest in artificial turf technology-FieldTurf-its green plastic reeds of imitation grass longer and softer than prior generations. As was well known among football and soccer pros who played on it, though, if you were tackled into FieldTurf, it would still give you nearly as wicked a burn as AstroTurf had.

This turned out to be unfortunate for Jesus Madrid, since Cooper-having observed the velociraptor’s routine for a couple days running, and stolen in here to nab him-decided from his place behind the water cooler that his best means of subduing the Polar Bear’s bodyguard was to offer up a reciprocal tackle-and-pin maneuver.