“Usually I just sell Bibles.”

Maureen scrutinized his face even more intently, looking for some hidden significance or an indication that he was making a joke. Condley winked, nodding meaningfully. She nodded back, dropping her gaze and smiling as if accepting it.

“Bibles,” she said.

“Right,” said Condley. He grinned, raising a finger into the air and winking at Maureen again as the servant poured her a glass of wine. “Luke, chapter five, verse seventeen. It’s what got me started and it hasn’t let me down.” He had no idea what Luke five, verse seventeen, said, but he figured that Maureen would probably check it out before she went to bed that night.

“Do you sell many?” asked Maureen.

“In the Philippines I’ve done real well. Truckloads of them. It’s a Catholic country. Everybody wants a Bible.”

“Yes. But they don’t have any money.”

“They’ve always got money for the Church.” Condley appraised the floor-to-ceiling bookcases on a nearby wall and the wealth of artifacts the Duncans had collected over their years of traveling. “If you were in the Philippines they’d sneak in here and steal those antiques, then use the money to buy my Bibles.” He winked again. “So you see, what you’re doing, what I’m doing, it all interconnects—politics, international security, commerce, crime, the Bible. Religion is a very powerful force.”

“But you don’t . . . actually represent the Church,” insisted Maureen patiently, now smirking at him with thinly veiled disbelief. Her eyes then lifted, staring past Condley. Behind them he heard the front door open again and then quickly close.

“I don’t need to represent the Church directly,” said Condley. “I have my connections in that capacity, but the Bible is its own church.”

“Quit lying to my wife!”

He turned his head. Wayne Duncan was standing just behind him, his hands on his hips, grinning madly. Suddenly the general put his huge hands on Condley’s shoulders and began bouncing him up and down in his chair. “Maureen, don’t believe a word that comes out of this cracker’s mouth!”

“Be careful,” howled Condley, straining to rise from the chair as Duncan kept bouncing him. “You’re being sacrilegious, and besides, you’re going to break my shoulders!”

“Condley, you always were a sorry son of a bitch! Tell her you lied, you little prick!”

Condley was getting whipped, but he was laughing. He felt happy and young again, fighting like this with Wayne Duncan. “All right, I lied! Did you want me telling your wife I hunted people down and blew them away before they gave me this job poking around in the dirt for bones?”

“I already did, you idiot!” Duncan quit pounding him, and they shook hands. “Good to see you, Lieutenant.”

“Skipper,” said Condley fondly. Their handshake was firm and as exuberant as the general’s shoulder-crunching welcome. “What’s the idea, dragging me off the street?”