“I passed uncomfortable on my way to numb about six years ago.”

We drove in silence the rest of the way.

Savannah’s place was a two-story Tudor estate fronting a sweeping, tree-lined motor court hidden from the street behind tall hedges and an electronically controlled security gate of solid teakwood. The house was set on nearly an acre of rose gardens and rolling lawns a half-mile above Sunset Boulevard. Out back was a man-made waterfall that cascaded into a black-bottom swimming lagoon. I stooped to stir the water. It was warm as a baby’s bath.

“Daddy must’ve been in a generous mood,” I said.

Inside were antique English furnishings, hickory plank floors, cathedral ceilings, and a kitchen twice the size of my garage apartment. I tailed her upstairs and down a long hallway, to the guest suite. Handwoven tapestry panels of royal blue hung floor-to-ceiling from ten-foot-high walls. At one end of the room was a king-sized four-poster bed hewn from massive, ancient logs and covered by a purple velvet spread. The spread was embroidered with some sort of royal crest that matched the wall hangings and tasseled pillow shams piled against the headboard. At the other end of the room, beneath a pair of lace-covered windows that opened out onto the lagoon and surrounding gardens below, was an honest-to-goodness fainting couch. I couldn’t decide if I’d arrived on the set of Camelot or Gone with the Wind.

“This is where you sleep,” Savannah said.

“Where do you sleep?”

She looked at me with something approaching disgust.

“Those days are long gone, Logan.”

I tossed my flight bag onto King Arthur’s bed. “For your information, Savannah, I’m not interested in sleeping with you. You’re a grieving widow. I respect that, even if I didn’t respect the worthless piece of crap you’re grieving for. So you can just chill.”

She let go a small laugh like we both knew I couldn’t possibly be serious about not wanting to bed her. Then she realized that my disinterest seemed genuine. A glint of disappointment flickered in her eyes.

“My apologies if I presumed things incorrectly,” she said.

“I need to make a few calls.”

“I’ll fix us some dinner. I have some nice salmon I can grill. You do eat salmon, don’t you?”

“You’re telling me you don’t have a chef? Place like this always has a chef. Butler, too. And a masseuse — at least one on call. I mean, what’s the point of conspicuous wealth if you can’t enjoy a few slaves, right?”

Savannah’s eyes narrowed. “Forget the salmon. We’ll be having mac ’n’ cheese.” She turned on her heel and left.

I shut the door and called Mrs. Schmulowitz. Would she mind feeding Kiddiot while I was away?

“How long you gone for, Bubeleh?” “A few days at most.”

“What do I feed him?”

“On the shelf above my bed. There are some cans of cat food, all different flavors.”

“Which ones does he prefer?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mrs. Schmulowitz. He won’t eat any of them.”

“He won’t eat them but you keep feeding them to him? That’s the most meshuggeneh thing I ever heard, because, I mean, let’s face it, my God, he’s positively portly. He’s the William Shatner of cats— who, by the way, is a member of my tribe. He must be eating something, this cat of yours.”

“If I knew the answer to that, Mrs. Schmulowitz, I’d know the answer to life itself.”

“I’ll make him a nice brisket. Nobody turns their nose up at my brisket, not even persnickety cats.”

“You’re a saint, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“Wrong religion, kiddo.” She hung up.

My next call was to an old friend I’ll refer to as “Buzz” who works counterterrorism at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The DIA is the American military’s very own in-house CIA. Most Americans have never heard of it. DIA employees would have it no other way. Headquartered at both the Pentagon and across the Potomac River in a sprawling, highly secure building that resembles a giant silver aircraft carrier, it is the DIA that gathers and analyzes classified information to produce the actionable intelligence that the military’s door-kickers rely on to bring terrorists to justice. Few DIA analysts look like what Hollywood would have you believe such spooks look like. They resemble librarians and community college professors, a decidedly academic bunch given to thick glasses and trousers that are too short, who toil at encrypted computers in secure, windowless offices, sipping coffee from mugs adorned with the Liberty Bell and patriotic idioms like, “These colors don’t run.” Buzz favored a mug that said “What SUV Would Jesus Drive?” On it was a drawing of the Messiah cruising the freeway in a Hummer, elbow crooked out the window like some long-haul trucker, holy hair billowing in the wind. When a particularly pious co-worker took exception to Buzz’s blasphemy, their mutual supervisor, an avid golfer, urged Buzz to find himself another, less sacrilegious vessel for his coffee. So Buzz did. His new mug said, “Golfers have tiny balls.”

“Allahu akbar,” Buzz grunted when I called. “How’s your scrotum?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s been awhile since I used it.”

“Join the club. When’re you coming back to the dark side? Our little G-WOT just isn’t the same without you.”

“I suspect the global war on terror is doing just fine without me,” I said. “Besides, you’re the one who’s indispensable.”

“And if you believe that, I got some swamp land I wanna sell you. Hell, I envy your shit, Logan. I’d pull the pin, too, if I could. Go sit on a beach somewhere, chugging Coronas and making fun of the touristas all day. But my kid’s got this crazy notion I’m supposed to pay his way through law school. So here I sit, saving the planet from tyranny, not to mention invasion from outer space. I haven’t had a fucking day off in six weeks.”

“Invasion from outer space?”

“Need-to-know basis. I’d tell you, but then, well, you know…”

“Oldest line in the book, Buzz.”

“Cut me some slack, Logan. I’m a burned-out, underpaid civil servant.”

We went way back, Buzz and I. One of the original go-to guys, he’d been there and done that a hundredfold by the time I clocked in at Alpha. Twice he’d been wounded on missions, the last time in Libya. Bleeding from just about everywhere from a rocket-propelled grenade that had exploded five feet away, Buzz ran down the terrorist who’d fired it at him and blew off the back of his head with a short-barreled, pistol-grip shotgun that Buzz called “The Bitch.” Only afterward did he realize that the terrorist was an eleven-year-old boy. Fragments from the RPG eventually claimed Buzz’s right eye, while recurrent nightmares of having killed a child robbed him of the desire to pull the trigger on anyone else ever again. He was assigned desk duty. By the time I arrived at Alpha, Buzz had built a network of personal contacts within the spook community so comprehensive, it had acquired its own acronym, BIA — the Buzz Intelligence Agency.

I asked him if he’d heard about what had happened to Echevarria, knowing that he undoubtedly possessed far more details than I did.

“I heard,” Buzz said, “poor bastard.”

“Anything you can enlighten me with?”

“Stand by one.”

I could hear him get up from his desk to go close his office door. Then he was back.

“He was doing contract work for folks across the river,” Buzz said. “Job apps, backgrounders, non-class shit is what I heard.”

“You think what happened to him was job-related?”

“That’s been knocked down. At least in this shop. I can’t speak for the shop he was freelancing for. They’ve still got an open file on him. I know that much. He and your old lady split. You heard that, right?”

“She told me. Actually, I’ve gotten sort of peripherally involved in the case, asking around, talking to a few people.”