Muir shook his head slowly, folding his arms over his chest. “This isn’t like calling the Department of Defense and giving them a name so they can trace down a man’s files, Brandon. There aren’t any centralized medical records in Australia. Mathew Larkin was never, to our best knowledge, in the Australian military. We’ve got to find out where he lived, and if we’re lucky we’ll either find his family or a medical facility that for some reason still might have his dental records. At this point, if there aren’t any medical records available, we may have to try a DNA match with family members. If there still are family members.”

“It seems pretty obvious he’s the guy.”

“That’s not good enough,” said Muir. “It’s ‘pretty obvious’ Pepper was Pepper, too.” He raised a finger into the air as if lecturing an elementary classroom. “‘Pretty obvious’ allows us to proceed forward, so that we might become, quote, ‘absolutely positive.’”

“Fuck it, he’s dead,” grunted Condley. “Let the Aussies figure it out.”

“Brandon, you’re hopeless.” Muir picked up a sealed manila envelope from his desk, holding it out for Condley. “By the way, another fellow wearing a tie dropped in this morning, leaving this for you.” Muir read from a business card. “Special Agent Combs?”

“Dick Tracy,” laughed Condley.

“He seemed very agitated that you weren’t here yet. In fact, he said some things about you that weren’t very nice.”

“Yeah, but they were probably true.”

Muir thought about that and shrugged. “You’re right. They were.”

“He wasn’t supposed to give that to anyone but me.”

“Yes,” said Muir, reading now from the labeling on the envelope. “In fact it does say, Eyes Only Brandon Condley, on the envelope.”

“I suppose I could get him fired for that. But he already knows I’m an asshole, so why bother?”

“Strange that he would give it to me,” mused Muir. “But I guess I look trustworthy.”

“It must have been the tie.”

“Anyway, I didn’t open it.” Muir handed the envelope to Condley, slowly breaking into a smile. “Anything good inside?”

“Dirty pictures,” said Condley, breaking the seal of the envelope with a pen. “They’ve been following you and your wife.” The envelope was open now. Condley pulled out the pages General Duncan had sent him and quickly examined them. Ever cautious in such matters, the general had printed them out on plain white paper, without a letterhead or other notations that might be easily traceable. The information that had been in the classified documents was now carefully sanitized to remove notations that were either too sensitive regarding methods or too specific regarding the identities of informants inside Russia. But all the essentials remained, including the name and address of the mysterious Anatolie Petrushinsky.

“Spot on!” said Condley, in a rare moment of true enthusiasm.

“The Russia thing?”