Persuader

second quite lazily and then the wave receded and the cleft drained and he was gone.
    It worked the same way for the second guy. The ocean took him away to join his buddy, and the maid. I squatted there for a moment, feeling the breeze on my face, listening to the tireless tide. Then I went back and closed up the Saab's hatch and slid into the driver's seat. Finished the job on the headliner and reached back and pulled out the maid's notes. There were eight legal-size pages of them. I read them all in the dim glow from the dome light. They were full of specifics. They had plenty of fine detail. But in general they didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I checked them twice and when I was finished I butted them into a neat stack and carried them back to the tip of the point. Sat down on a rock and folded each page into a paper boat. Somebody had showed me how, when I was a kid. Maybe it had been my dad. I couldn't remember. Maybe it had been my brother. I launched the eight little boats on the receding tide one after the other and watched them sail and bob away into the pitch darkness in the east.
    Then I went back and spent some time fixing the headliner. I got it looking pretty good. I closed up the garage. I figured I would be gone before anybody opened it up again and noticed the damage on the car. I headed back to the house. Reloaded my pockets and relocked the door and crept back upstairs. Stripped to my shorts and slid into bed. I wanted to get three more hours. So I reset the alarm in my head and hauled the sheet and the blanket up around me and pressed a dip into the pillow and closed my eyes again.
    Tried to sleep. But I couldn't. It wouldn't come. Dominique Kohl came instead. She came straight at me out of the darkness, like I knew she would.
    The eighth time we met we had tactical problems to discuss. Taking down an intel officer was a can of worms. Obviously MPs deal exclusively with military people gone bad, so acting against one of our own was not a novelty. But the intel community was a case apart. Those guys were separate and secretive and they tried very hard to be accountable to nobody. They were tough to get at. Generally they closed ranks faster than the best drill squad you ever saw. So Kohl and I had a lot to talk about. I didn't want to have the meeting in my office. There was no visitor's chair. I didn't want her standing up the whole time. So we went back to the bar in town. It seemed like an appropriate location.
    The whole thing was getting so heavy we were ready to feel a little paranoid about it.
    Going off-base seemed like a smart thing to do. And I liked the idea of discussing intel matters like a couple of regular spies, in a dark little booth at the back of a tavern. I think Kohl did, too. She showed up in civilian clothes. Not a dress, but jeans and a white T- shirt with a leather jacket over it. I was in fatigues. I didn't have any civilian clothes. The weather was cold by then. I ordered coffee. She got tea. We wanted to keep our heads clear.
    "I'm glad we used the real blueprints now," she said.
    I nodded.
    "Good instinct," I said. As far as evidence went we needed to slam-dunk the whole thing.
    For Quinn to be in possession of the real blueprints would go a long way. Anything less than that, he could start spinning stories about test procedures, war games, exercises, entrapment schemes of his own.
    "It's the Syrians," she said. "And they're paying in advance. On an installment plan."
    "How?"
    "Briefcase exchange," she said. "He meets with an attaché from the Syrian Embassy.
    They go to a café in Georgetown. They both carry those fancy aluminum briefcases, identical."
    "Halliburton," I said.
    She nodded. "They put them side by side under the table and he picks up the Syrian guy's when he leaves."
    "He's going to say the Syrian is a legit contact. He's going to say the guy is passing him stuff."
    "So we say, OK, show us the stuff."
    "He'll say he can't, because it's classified." Kohl said nothing. I smiled.
    "He'll give us a big song and dance," I said. "He'll put his hand on our shoulders and look into our eyes and say, Hey, trust me on this, folks, national security is involved."
    " Have you dealt with these guys before?"
    "Once," I said.
    "Did you win?" I nodded. "They're generally full of shit. My brother was MI for a time. Now he works for Treasury. But he told me all about them. They think they're smart, whereas they're really the same as anybody else."
    "So what do