“Of course not,” I agreed, still jovial. “It’s where you design all those important classes for people like Colonel Baggetto to keep them on their toes, with up-to-the-minute strategies on how to persuade ISIS to cough up their secrets. In your spare time, you protect America’s farms from invasive species.”

He’d been screwing the corners of his mouth down in annoyance, but at my last sentence his expression shifted. I couldn’t quite decipher it. Alert? Worried?

“What did the colonel tell you?”

“Yes.” Kiel and Chesnitz had joined us. “Just what did Baggetto say?”

“I don’t think I should discuss it in an open space like this,” I said, my tone provocative.

Actually, no one was paying attention to us. There were perhaps a dozen family members waiting in the atrium, along with the staff members who stopped periodically to talk to them, sympathetic hands on frightened shoulders. Life in the ICU was a constant round of intense drama; families screaming in anguish near the nurses’ station probably happened so often that no one found our histrionics worth watching—except Nurse Heinz, frown lines deep between her eyes as she tried to assess whether Kiel or I was going to lose control again.

“The spent fuel rods,” I whispered.

“Oh.” Pinsen’s face relaxed. “Yes. They’ve disappeared. I’m sure Dante—the colonel—told you not to touch them if you found them.”

“My college library sat on top of the first nuclear chain reaction,” I said. “We all knew better than to play with uranium rods.”

“Good. Call the colonel at once if you come upon the canister. If you can’t reach him, phone me.” Pinsen pulled a card case from his jacket, extracted one, and gave it to me.

It didn’t reveal anything—not a rank, not an address, just a cell-phone number and an e-mail address. Maybe he had other cards with his real name, his actual organizational loyalty—CIA, NSA, NFL? I stuck it in my hip pocket.

“You were with Sonia Kiel just now,” Pinsen stated. “Did she have anything interesting to contribute?”

“Depends on what you think is interesting. Her parents thought she was too fat as a teenager.”

“And she’s still fat,” Kiel growled.

“But losing weight while she’s laid up here,” I said encouragingly. “How much does she need to lose before you can listen to what she’s saying?”

“You’ve met Sonia once, but you think you understand her mind,” Chesnitz said. “I’ve been treating her for thirty years and—”

“And we all see how much good that’s done,” I snapped.

“Did she talk about the missing material?” Pinsen cut off the start of a tirade from Chesnitz.

I shook my head. “She’s only just regaining consciousness, and her speech is shaky. I doubt she remembers anything about the night outside the Lion’s Pride. We did touch on the 1983 protest.”