He hit the Enter key. A fairly slow-loading map came up in a box, a red crosshair graphic centered on the map-over the middle of the Indian Ocean.

“Store that just in case,” Laramie said, “but I don’t see any relevance in an Indian Ocean location. Try again.”

Knowles found a pad and began taking notes while he entered numbers on the computer. “I’ll keep track of all the combinations,” he said.

Another location popped up on the map, this time off the coast of Greenland. Knowles kept at it with various combinations, eliminating one after another, as a variety of unlikely locations for anything related to Americanization training or sleeper agents popped up in the crosshairs on the map.

“Doesn’t matter,” Knowles said. “Trial and error. Let’s reverse it.”

Cole said, “You mean, people first, then day of week, then time?”

“Right.”

Cole laid that version out for him: two, one, four-one-five; eight, two, five-three.

Laramie thought of something as another few open-ocean locations resulted from what Knowles entered.

“Simplify it,” she said. “Eliminate the seconds. If we’re going with this order, the seconds would be the minutes past the hour of the meeting time.”

Knowles punched in 21-4 for latitude, 82-5 for longitude.

Cole mumbled something about trying the addresses, and was in the process of rising to retrieve his notes, when the crosshairs centered on a section of the Caribbean just south of the western portion of Cuba.

None of them said anything for a moment.

Cole said, “That where they dumped him on the boat, maybe?”

“Sunday,” Laramie said. “Not Monday.”

Cole looked at her.

“Sunday’s the first day of the week,” she said. “First day of the work week is Monday, but-I took French in my training program, that’s what made me think of it-you’re learning French, you know what they teach you early on? That the French count Monday as the first day of the week. Lundi, mardi, mercredi… But we count Sunday as the first day of the week on our calendars. And if he was being formally Americanized, that’s what they would teach him early on. That’s the way he would assume we would think of the days of the week, because that’s what he’d have been taught.”

Knowles already had the boxes filled in: 22-4, 83-5. He hit Enter again.

Resolving itself in the same, slow fashion, the red crosshairs centered over the Cuban landmass this time-a hundred miles from the southwestern tip of the island.

“I’ll be damned,” Cole said.

“Map kind of speaks for itself,” Knowles said.

Laramie looked at the map, and its red crosshair graphic.

“San Cristóbal,” she said, naming the city adjoining the red crosshair graphic. She offered Cole a whack on the shoulder. “Nice work, Detective.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Knowles said. “Also, we might want to go back in and add the ‘seconds’ based on the number of minutes past four and five P.M. that he held his meetings. Could be he narrowed it down even better than this.”

Something occurred to Laramie about the location of the crosshair, but she decided she could confirm her suspicion later. She’d take a look at what she figured to lie in the crosshairs-just as soon as she got a hold of the operative they’d paid twenty million bucks to place in their tool kit.

She thought of something else that had been working its way around her head during their discussion.

“Now we know the role Lois the dispatcher played,” she said.

Knowles and Cole looked at her, not grasping it yet.

“By my guess,” she said, “he made friends with her because she was the one who could ensure he keep his schedule-week in, week out.”

Knowles considered the notion, then nodded.

“You may be right,” he said.

Laramie stood.

“I think it’s about time I gave our operative a call,” she said.

Cooper had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy digging up the dirt on “ICR,” whatever the letters stood for. For starters, the third letter on the board was partially cut off by the frayed edge of the wood, so that the company name, if that’s what it was, might have been “IC Rentals” or “ICRT” as easily as it could have been just the simpler acronym “ICR.”

More out of laziness than anything else, Cooper decided to place his bet on the easy version, which meant searching for a three-word company name, or individual’s name, with current or former holdings in Guatemala or Central America. Though he knew just from the scent of the soil it was unlikely that ICR, the person or company, would be claiming any involvement with the facility built, operated, and burned in the upper portion of that figure-eight of volcanic crater where they’d taken their little hike. Whoever or whatever it was, ICR probably wouldn’t even admit to being in Guatemala at all, meaning searching based on a geographical presence would probably turn out to be a waste of time.

There were six relevant, classified databases he could search, and more than a few techniques he knew to employ with ordinary search engines, to hunt around for the dirt. This morning he’d picked the veranda as the operations center. It was almost dawn, Cooper lucky it wasn’t pouring rain the way it almost always did before the sun came up. Ronnie, he knew, would soon emerge to slice his melons, and probably want to talk-ask him where he’d been, tell him about some crap one guest or another had pulled, a crazy request he’d been asked to provide.

Cooper usually answering, That’s what you get for being an errand boy. You get to run errands, or something to that effect.

While he still had the peace and quiet, Cooper did his work-and found nothing. He started with Google and some other less reliable ordinary search engines, working through Spanish-language variations first, separating the letters, trying one Spanish word beginning with I, then two words beginning with I and C, and so on. He tried the other techniques he’d honed during his many hours with nothing to do, but other than a few individuals’ names-Inez Charon Rodriguez, for instance, who, he learned, lived in Argentina and enjoyed water sports and horseback riding-there was no name, company or otherwise, that popped up showing any apparent relevance. He tried more and more variations, using some standard Spanish words, working through the logical ways a Spanish-language company name would be structured, but again found zilch.

He switched to English variations and after another forty minutes of looking, found only a number of obscure entities that seemed to have nothing to do with corporate or government business.

He tried some of the slower, though occasionally more thorough federal databases he liked to use, but soon concluded he was wasting his time. There wasn’t any publicly named organization with known ties to Central America that used the initials ICR, at least not that related to a chemical spill or the manufacturing of materials that might have caused one.

Not that he’d expected to find anything to go on anyway.

He closed his PowerBook, putting it to sleep automatically, then tossed his left ankle over his right knee, crossed his fingers behind his head, and leaned back in the plastic deck chair that he knew would break if he put too much weight into his lean.

Earlier he’d placed the strip of wood on the white plastic table beside his PowerBook, the wood’s letters beginning to fade. Cooper lifted his bare foot to shove one end of it and spin it in place on the tabletop.

He had plenty of people he could call-among others, any of a number of the individuals Cooper kept on his long list of corrupt souls he’d caught in action and was always pleased to blackmail or extort when opportunity beckoned. He’d try a few such souls later today, see whether they could give him some goods on the letters printed on the scrap of wood-but he knew it’d only be due diligence, and nothing more. He had that sense he sometimes got-that he’d already found all he’d be finding. The rest was nothing more than a waste of energy and time.