Michaels smiled. “Leo will be Leo.”

They stood there facing each other.

“OK,” Harris said. “Why the hell are you here?”

“He’s not,” Morse said from her desk. “Neither are we. This meeting isn’t taking place.”

Harris looked at her. “Uh-huh. Got it. So, what now?”

“Now we talk,” she said.

Leo was quiet. After a minute he turned back toward Michaels.

“You up to speed on Stephen Gelfland?”

“Carol sent me the info last night,” Michaels said. “But Gelfland isn’t specifically the reason I flew in.”

“So, what is?”

“I have to tell you things about the Seven Winds Group, the CIA and the CloudCable deal. And why the Stalwart’s disappearance should put the fear of God into us.”

Harris looked at him, took a deep breath and exhaled.

“Lovely,” he said.

Carmody rode out to Teterboro on a BMW Motorrad R 18 that Kali kept in a small, reserved garage spot on Greenwich Street. The motorcycle was a long, smooth-running beast with a double steel-tube frame, sweetly balanced boxer engine and wide curved handlebars.

A few blocks west of the garage, he took it across Tenth Avenue onto I-495, wound through Jersey traffic along 95 south of Union City and West New York, then continued east for several miles onto Route 46, where he could finally lace it open on the narrow strip of Industrial Avenue heading out to the field.

The hangars belonging to Great Circle Charter were at the northwestern edge of the airport. Carmody had called ahead and saw Nick DeBattista waiting in front of the low prefab office building when the bike swung into the parking area.

DeBattista waved. Carmody cruised into a space a few feet away from him, braked, got off and walked up.

“Nice bike,” he said. “What bank you rob?”

“It belongs to a friend.”

“She know you’re riding it?”

“How do you know my friend’s a she?”

DeBattista just shrugged.

“She must be crazy,” he said. “Or crazy about you.”

“Probably neither.”

The corner of DeBattista’s lips slanted upward a millimeter. He was tall, thin and about thirty, with a trio of small gold rings in his right ear and a perpetually wily, brazen expression on his face. During his Company days, Carmody had run insertions and extractions through his uncle in Italy and seen the old man flash the same larcenous half smile. Like the fox that ate the kitchen leftovers, then came back to eat the cat food. And maybe the cat.

They shook hands.

“So,” DeBattista said, “where you want to go that you couldn’t talk about over the phone?”

“Romania,” Carmody said. “Then Crimea.”

“Just a little ways off, huh?”

“If I was flying to Disneyland, I wouldn’t come to you.”

“True that,” DeBattista said. “This round-trip?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s it depend on?”

“We’ll get to it later.”

DeBattista grunted.