“All the more reason why we need to step in to fill the vacuum,” said Abboud. “And we do have jurisdiction, by treaty and international law, over what was an incident involving our prisoner. I can send you the authorities if you don’t believe me.”

Donny didn’t need to look it up, because he realized it was true the moment she said it.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Because I’m not your leaker. Now, speaking of missing bodies, I need to go find Mr. Harrison. And when I do, you can talk to him yourself.”

“Good luck with that,” said Abboud. She stood to leave. “Here is where you can contact us if you remember anything you think we might be interested to hear. It would be much easier if you would tell us anything you know now, rather than having us find out through other sources that you haven’t been truthful.”

When Abboud smiled as she handed him her business card, Donny realized that she was probably the type who could get him to say whatever she wanted, given the right interrogation setup.

But that would never happen. Because Donny was pretty sure that the people who could pin him for what they were sniffing out were either dead or in a place where no Eurocop will ever find them.

5

Donny went through his calendar, trying to piece it together.

Donny was probably the last lawyer left in America who kept his calendar on paper. It was a habit he had formed during the prior administration, when he was working the secret cases, representing people under government surveillance. He had learned the hard way that the federal agents fighting what they viewed as a revolutionary insurgency did not let attorney-client privilege get in the way. And the judges backed them up, most of the time. That meant anything you recorded in digital form on a device connected to the network was likely to be caught in the net. And they even had ways of getting into devices that were off-network. So Donny carried a hardbound daily calendar just like his grandma used to. They could search that, too, if they wanted to harass him in person—something they often did. What they couldn’t do was make him write legibly. And it would take a lot more than some Motherland men in black to get him to read his own handwriting. Assuming he could if he tried. The legibility of his own scrawl had a rapidly diminishing half-life even to its author, such that the older the entry the harder it was for him to fill in the gaps.

That worked great, until he found himself needing to dig into last year’s calendar and put together a chronology of his meetings with Slider.