“What’s up?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Reacher, what’s the matter?”

“You put another agent in eight weeks ago,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What?”

“What I said.”

“What agent?”

“She died this morning. She underwent a radical double mastectomy without the benefit of anesthetic.”

She stared at me. “Teresa?”

I shook my head.

“Not Teresa,” I said. “The other one.”

“What other one?”

“Don’t bullshit me,” I said.

“What other one?”

I stared at her. Hard. Then softer. There was something about the light in that coffee shop. Maybe it was the way it came off all the blond wood and the brushed metal and the glass and the chrome. It was like X-ray light. Like a truth serum. It had shown me Elizabeth Beck’s genuine uncontrollable blush. Now I was expecting it to show me the exact same thing from Duffy. I was expecting it to show me a deep red blush of shame and embarrassment, because I had found her out. But it showed me total surprise instead. It was right there in her face. She had gone very pale. She had gone stark white with shock. It was like the blood had drained right out of her. And nobody can do that on command, any more than they can blush.

“What other one?” she said again. “There was only Teresa. What? Are you telling me she’s dead?”

“Not Teresa,” I said again. “There was another one. Another woman. She got hired on as a kitchen maid.”

“No,” she said. “There’s only Teresa.”

I shook my head again. “I saw the body. It wasn’t Teresa.”

“A kitchen maid?”

“She had an e-mail thing in her shoe,” I said. “Exactly the same as mine. The heel was scooped out by the same guy. I recognized the handiwork.”

“That’s not possible,” she said.

I looked straight at her.

“I would have told you,” she said. “Of course I would have told you. And I wouldn’t have needed you if I had another agent in there. Don’t you see that?”

I looked away. Looked back. Now I was embarrassed.

“So who the hell was she?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Just started nudging her cup around and around on her saucer, prodding at the handle with her forefinger, turning it ten degrees at a time. The heavy foam and the chocolate dust stayed still while the cup rotated. She was thinking like crazy.

“Eight weeks ago?” she said.

I nodded.

“What alerted them?” she asked.

“They got into your computer,” I said. “This morning, or maybe last night.”

She looked up from her cup. “That’s what you were asking me about?”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“Teresa isn’t in the computer,” she said. “She’s off the books.”

“Did you check with Eliot?”

“I did better than check,” she said. “I searched the whole of his hard drive. And all of his files on the main server back in D.C. I’ve got total access everywhere. I looked for Teresa, Daniel, Justice, Beck, Maine, and undercover. And he didn’t write any of those words anywhere.”

I said nothing.

“How did it go down?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I guess at first the computer told them you had somebody in there, and then it told them it was a woman. No name, no details. So they looked for her. And I think it was partly my fault they found her.”

“How?”

“I had a stash,” I said. “Your Glock, and the ammo, and a few other things. She found them. She hid them in the car she was using.”

Duffy was quiet for a second.

“OK,” she said. “And you’re thinking they searched the car and your stuff made her look bad, right?”

“I guess so.”

“But maybe they searched her first and found the shoe.”

I looked away. “I sincerely hope so.”

“Don’t beat up on yourself. It’s not your fault. As soon as they got into the computer it was only a matter of time for the first one they looked at. They both fit the bill. I mean, how many women were there to choose from? Presumably just her and Teresa. They couldn’t miss.”

I nodded. There was Elizabeth, too. And there was the cook. But neither one of them would figure very high on a list of suspicious persons. Elizabeth was the guy’s wife. And the cook had probably been there twenty years.

“But who was she?” I said.

She played with her cup until it was back in its starting position. The unglazed rim on the bottom made a tiny grinding sound.

“It’s obvious, I’m afraid,” she said. “Think of the time line here. Count backward from today. Eleven weeks ago I screwed up with the surveillance photographs. Ten weeks ago they pulled me off the case. But because Beck is a big fish I couldn’t give it up and so nine weeks ago I put Teresa in without their knowledge. But also because Beck is a big fish, and without my knowledge, they must have reassigned the case to someone else and eight weeks ago that someone else put this maid person in, right on top of Teresa. Teresa didn’t know the maid was coming and the maid didn’t know Teresa was already there.”

“Why would she have nosed into my stuff?”

“I guess she wanted to control the situation. Standard procedure. As far as she was concerned, you weren’t anybody kosher. You were just a loose cannon. Some kind of troublemaker. You were a cop-killer, and you were hiding weapons. Maybe she thought you were from a rival operation. She was probably thinking of selling you out to Beck. It would have enhanced her credibility with him. And she needed you out of the way, because she didn’t need extra complications. If she didn’t sell you out to Beck, she would have turned you in to us, as a cop-killer. I’m surprised she didn’t already.”

“Her battery was dead.”

She nodded. “Eight weeks. I guess kitchen maids don’t have good access to cell phone chargers.”

“Beck said she was out of Boston.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “They probably farmed it out to the Boston field office. That would work, geographically. And it would explain why we didn’t pick up any kind of water-cooler whispers in D.C.”

“He said she was recommended by some friends of his.”

“Plea-bargainers, for sure. We use them all the time. They set each other up quite happily. No code of silence with these people.”

Then I remembered something else Beck had said.

“How was Teresa communicating?” I asked.

“She had an e-mail thing, like yours.”

“In her shoe?”

Duffy nodded. Said nothing. I heard Beck’s voice, loud in my head: I’m going to start searching people’s shoes, that’s for damn sure. You can bet your life on that.

“When did you last hear from her?”

“She fell off the air the second day.”

She went quiet.

“Where was she living?” I asked.

“In Portland. We put her in an apartment. She was an office clerk, not a kitchen maid.”

“You been to the apartment?”

She nodded. “Nobody’s seen her there since the second day.”

“You check her closet?”

“Why?”

“We need to know what shoes she was wearing when she was captured.”

Duffy went pale again.

“Shit,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “What shoes were left in her closet?”

“The wrong ones.”

“Would she think to ditch the e-mail thing?”

“Wouldn’t help her. She’d have to ditch the shoes, too. The hole in the heel would tell the story, wouldn’t it?”

“We need to find her,” I said.

“We sure do,” she said. Then she paused a beat. “She was very lucky today. They went looking for a woman, and they happened to look at the maid first. We can’t count on her staying that lucky much longer.”

I said nothing. Very lucky for Teresa, very unlucky for the maid. Every silver lining has a cloud. Duffy sipped her coffee. Grimaced slightly like the taste was off and put the cup back down again.

“But what gave her away?” she said. “In the first place? That’s what I want to know. I mean, she only lasted two days. And that was nine whole weeks before they broke into the computer.”