“Not when I’m negotiating the Eisenhower. Mineral water will be fine, thanks.” Since I’d investigated him I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d done the same to me.

His private office was filled with more photographs and trophies—and exotic hardwoods and carpets and art. A diploma issued by the Naval Academy held a prominent place near his desk, next to a photograph of a much younger Baladine on board a destroyer, shaking hands with Nixon’s Secretary of Defense.

“Yes, I was in Vietnam in the sixties. And then had my own ship for a few years.”

“That was before you joined Rapelec’s defense division, wasn’t it?”

I said it without looking at him: I didn’t want to overplay my hand by scanning his face for any surprise at my research into his life—which had not garnered his drinking preferences. Still, I’d learned that at Rapelec he had moved rapidly from a job in systems procurement to managing their submarine division, and then to heading the manufacture of all rapid–deployment weapons, before the end of the Cold War shrank the importance of the unit. Carnifice brought him in as CEO five years ago. Their private prison business was one of the divisions that had grown the most rapidly under his command.

Claudia brought a bottle of Malvern water and poured for both of us, with a murmured reminder that his conference call with Tokyo would be coming through in half an hour.

“Thanks, Claudia.” He waited for the door to shut. “A picture like that probably doesn’t inspire you in the same way as it does me, since I gather you and I were on opposite sides in Vietnam.”

Okay, he had a staff of three thousand plus to go looking at everything from my drinking habits to my college protest activities, but it still made me uncomfortable. I knew I would have to work hard to keep my temper—since his research had probably also told him that was a vulnerable spot on my heel.

“I was on the side of Washington and Jefferson,” I said, “perhaps the side of naïveté and idealism. And you?”

“Certainly I’ve never been naive. Either about America’s external enemies or her internal.” He gestured me to a seat next to a coffee table made out of some kind of gold burl.

“And so it was a natural progression for you. To move from killing Zimbabweans to incarcerating Americans. Although exactly why Zimbabwe was an American enemy I’m not sure.”

At that his face did twist in brief surprise: Rapelec’s arming of the South African secret forces’ raids into Zimbabwe during the eighties had been the most deeply buried item I’d found in my afternoon’s research. I didn’t think it had anything to do with Nicola Aguinaldo’s death, but it did shed some insight into Baladine’s character.