Inside Outt

coffee or being stuck with her back to the door or both, he didn’t know. It was satisfying either way.
    “Who are you?” the woman said.
    He picked up the coffee and took a sip. “It’s not going to work that way.”
    “What way is that?”
    “The way where you ask the questions.”
    “Look, if I wanted to—”
    “But you don’t want to. Otherwise, you would have already.”
    She drummed her fingers along the table. He couldn’t help noticing how attractive she was. That great skin; close-cropped, natural black hair; full lips; perfect teeth. Maybe that’s why he’d instantly written her off as a potential threat when he’d first spotted her. Stupid.
    She opened her purse and took out an ID. The ID read,
Special Agent Paula Lanier, Federal Bureau of Investigation,
along with a photo.
    Ben looked up from the ID. “Well, Paula, it’s good to meet you.”
    “Sorry I can’t say the same. And now it’s your turn.”
    Ben didn’t want to get into specifics. The Froomkin identity was backstopped, but someone within the FBI itself could debunk it easily enough.
    “Why don’t you just call me Ben,” he said.
    “All right, Ben, who are you with?”
    “With?”
    “Stop messing around with me, okay? I want to know who you are and what you were doing at Marcy Wheeler’s house. And I want to know whatever she told you.”
    He took another sip of coffee. “That’s a lot to ask, on short acquaintance.”
    “It’s not, really. Not when you consider that you can tell me here, or I can arrest you right now and we can conduct the interview at the Orlando field office instead.”
    “Is this the hard way or the easy way again? It didn’t work out well for Bob and Drew back there. You sure you want to go down that road, too?”
    “I’m the one who had the drop on you, remember?”
    “Then why haven’t you just arrested me?”
    “Because I’d rather do this off the record for now.”
    “Why?”
    “Look, I know who you are. Or what, anyway. You’ve got spook written all over you.”
    Ben couldn’t help smiling. “I could say the same about you, you know.”
    She cocked an eyebrow. “Funny. I know you’re CIA. Could have been DIA, maybe, but I know they’re not involved in this thing.”
    Interesting that she would assume that. Well, Hort told him the CIA would be conducting its own off-the-books investigation, trying to beat the FBI to the tapes. Looked like the Bureau was aware of the problem, too.
    He felt a momentary unease. These missing tapes were big. Maybe the biggest thing he’d ever worked on. A lot of players were after them, maybe for a lot of different reasons. A part of him wondered why all these agencies were circling one another the way they were, and the thought was as unfamiliar as it was uncomfortable. He was accustomed to thinking in terms of who. And when. And where. And how. But
why
? For the second time in as many days, he reminded himself that why was someone else’s problem.
    “What are you, Ground Branch?” she said. “You’re former military. I can tell by the way you move.”
    “Yeah? Well, I took a look at you and couldn’t tell anything. Until you were pointing a gun at me.”
    She smiled. “That’s right. No one ever sees me coming.”
    An unprofessional double entendre popped into Ben’s mind and some vestigial sense of judgment saved him from giving it voice.
    “I’ll bet they don’t,” he said, keeping it neutral.
    “So don’t blame yourself too much.”
    “I’ll get over it.”
    They sat in silence for a moment, watching each other, and Ben knew she was evaluating him the way he was her.
    “All right,” he said, “so why off the record?”
    She smiled just the tiniest bit, and he realized she’d been using the silence to draw him out. Damn, he had to stop underestimating women.
    “Because I’ve never seen interagency cooperation worse than what we have on this case. Not even compared to what I’ve heard it was like before 9/11. And look what all that distrust and rivalry caused back then. When we don’t work together, Americans die. It’s that simple, but you people never seem to wake up to it.”
    “ ‘You people?’ What about your side?” Weird to suddenly find himself pretending to be an FBI guy pretending to be a CIA guy, but he went with it.
    “Oh, there’s plenty of blame to go around, I’m sure. But we’re getting next to zero from the Agency on this one. We had to threaten a subpoena just to get a few records. And