'Maybe you can tell me something.'

'Like what?'

'Gerasimov, Nikolay Borissovich Gerasimov. Was he really the head of KGB? Did my dad really drag his ass out of Moscow?'

Wills hesitated for a moment, but there was no avoiding it. 'Yeah. He was the KGB chairman, and, yes, your dad did arrange his defection.'

'No shit? How the hell did Dad arrange that one?'

'That is a very long story and you are not cleared for it.'

'Then why did he rat Dad out?'

'Because he was an unwilling defector. Your father forced him to bug out. He wanted to get even after your dad became President. But, you know, Nikolay Borissovich sang — maybe not like a canary, but he sang anyway. He's in the Witness Protection Program right now. They still bring him in every so often to get him to sing some more. The people you bag, they never give you everything all at once, and so you go back to them periodically. It makes them feel important — enough that they sing some more, usually. He's still not a happy camper. He can't go home. They'd shoot his ass. The Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. Well, neither are we. So, he lives here with federal protection. Last I heard, he took up golf. His daughter got married to some old-money aristocrat asshole in Virginia. She's a real American now, but her dad will die an unhappy man. He wanted to take the Soviet Union over, by which I mean he really wanted that job, but your father screwed that one up for all time, and Nick still carries the grudge.'

'I'll be damned.'

'Anything new with Sali?' Wills asked, bringing things back to reality.

'There's some little stuff. You know, fifty thousand here, eighty thousand there — pounds, not dollars. Into accounts I don't know much about. He goes through anywhere from two to eight thousand pounds a week in what he probably considers petty cash.'

'Where does that cash originate?' Wills asked.

'Not entirely clear, Tony. I figure he skims some off his family account, maybe two percent that he can write off as expenses. Not quite enough to alert his father that's he stealing from Mom and Pop. I wonder how they'd react to that?' Jack speculated.

'They wouldn't cut his hand off, but they could do something worse — cut his money off. You see this guy working for a living?'

'You mean real work?' Jack had himself a brief laugh. 'Somehow I don't see that happening. He's been on the gravy train too long to like driving spikes into the ties. I've been to London a lot. Hard to figure how a working stiff survives there.'

Wills began humming. ''How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they seen Paree?''

Jack flushed. 'Look, Tony, yeah, I know I grew up rich, but Dad always made sure I had a summer job. I even worked construction for two months. Made life hard for Mike Brennan and his pals. But Dad wanted me to know what it was like to do real work. I hated it at first, but, looking back, it was probably a good thing, I guess. Mr. Sali here has never done that. I mean, I could survive in a real-world entry-level job if I had to. It'd be a lot harder adjustment for this guy.'

'Okay, how much unexplained money, total?'

'Maybe two hundred thousand pounds — three hundred thousand bucks, call it. But I haven't really pinned it down yet, and it's not all that much money.'

'How much longer to narrow it down?'

'At this rate? Hell, maybe a week if I'm lucky. This is like tracking a single car during New York rush hour, y'know?'

'Keep it up. Isn't supposed to be easy, or fun.'

'Aye, aye, sir.' It was something he'd picked up from the Marines at the White House. They'd even said that to him once in a while, until his father had noticed and put an immediate end to it. Jack turned back to his computer. He kept his real notes on a pad of white lined paper, just because it was easier for him that way, then transferred them to a separate computer file every afternoon. As he wrote, he noted that Tony was leaving their little room for a trip upstairs.

* * *

'This kid's got the eye,' Wills told Rick Bell on the top floor.

'Oh?' It was a little early for any results from the rookie, regardless who his father was, Bell thought.

'I put him on a young Saudi living in London, name of Uda bin Sali — money changer for his family's interests. The Brits have a loose tail on him because he called somebody they found interesting once.'

'And?'

'And Junior has found a couple of hundred thousand pounds that can't be accounted for.'

'How solid is that?' Bell asked.

'We'll have to put a regular on it, but, you know… this kid's got the right sort of nose.'

'Dave Cunningham, maybe?' A forensic accountant, he'd joined The Campus out of the Department of Justice, Organized Crime Division. Pushing sixty, Dave had a legendary nose for numbers. The trading department at The Campus mainly used him for 'conventional' duties. He could have done very well on Wall Street, but he'd just loved bagging bad guys for a living. At The Campus, he could pursue that avocation well past government retirement rules.

'Dave'd be my pick,' Tony agreed.

'Okay, let's cross-load Jack's computer files to Dave and see what he turns over.'

'Works for me, Rick. You see the take-report from NSA yesterday?'

'Yeah. Got my attention,' Bell answered, looking up. Three days before, message traffic from sources that the government intelligence services found interesting had dropped by seventeen percent and two particularly interesting sources had almost completely stopped. When radio traffic in a military unit did that, it often meant a stand-down prior to real operations. The sort of thing that made signals- intelligence people nervous. The majority of the time, it meant nothing at all, just random chance in operation, but it had developed into something real often enough that the signal-spooks frequently went into a tizzy about it.

'Any ideas?' Wills asked.

Bell shook his head. 'I stopped being superstitious about ten years ago.'

Clearly, Tony Wills had not: 'Rick, we're due. We've been due for a long time.'

'I know what you're saying, but we can't run this place on that sort of stuff.'

'Rick, this is like sitting at a ball game — dugout seats, maybe, but you still can't go on the field when you want.'

'To do what, kill the umpire?' Bell asked.

'No, just the guy planning to throw a beanball.'

'Patience, Tony, patience.'

'Son of a bitch of a virtue to acquire, isn't it?' Wills had never quite learned it, despite all his experience.

'Think you have it bad? What about Gerry?'

'Yeah, Rick, I know.' He stood. 'Later, man.'

* * *

They' d seen not another human being, not a car, not a helicopter. Clearly, there was nothing of value out here. No oil, no gold, not even copper. Nothing worth guarding or protecting. The walk had just been enough to be healthy. Some scrubby bushes, even some stunted trees. A few tire tracks, but none of them recent. This part of America might as well have been Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter, the Rub' al-Khali, where even a hardy desert camel would have found it grim going.

But clearly the walk was over. As they crested a small rise, they saw five more vehicles sitting all alone, with men standing by them talking among themselves.

'Ah,' Ricardo said, 'they are early, too. Excellent.' He could dump these morose foreigners and get on with his business. He stopped and let his clients catch up.

'This is our destination?' Mustafa asked, with hope in his voice. It had been an easy walk, far easier than he'd expected.

'My friends there will take you to Las Cruces. There you can make your travel plans for the future.'

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