He Googled Hogan. According to Wikipedia, he’d been a mechanical engineer before becoming a podcast superstar. The IDW article in the Times attributed his large following to his knack for ‘immaculate logic’. Maybe they should ask him how to find a missing soup truck full of drugs.

The phone cut out of Google as a call came through. Unknown number, but he answered anyway.

‘Yes?’

‘This is Detective John Blaine with the Los Angeles Police Department. Who am I speaking with, please?’

Vincent told him.

Blaine said, ‘You spoke with Deputy Marshal Colton Locke earlier today, is that correct?’

Something in the guy’s tone.

‘Sir? His phone records indicate he called your number this morning.’

Vincent shut his eyes and said, ‘What’s happened?’

He didn’t tell Erin. He left the green room and went out into the open area behind the audience seating. There were tables set up with catering for the crew, guys moving lights around, people in headsets looking harried.

They’d killed a US Marshal.

Maybe it should have been obvious from the start, but he was up against people who would never stop. They weren’t going to reach a point where they felt they’d gone too far.

He stood quietly, people moving around him, going about their jobs, and every so often someone would check the security pass on the lanyard around his neck.

A dull, steady thunder as the audience filed into the seating. He moved to where he could see the stage and leaned against a scaffold. Ushers got the crowd settled, and then the lights dimmed, and Hogan and Erin came onto the stage.

Hogan plugged her book for a few minutes, and then gave it over to Erin to flesh out her basic thesis: that, granted, war is horrific, but it is not necessarily unethical or unjustified.

She was a good speaker, Vincent thought—points coming out clean and structured without hesitation, and every so often she’d turn what he thought was a nice phrase: something about the strangeness of ostensibly moral people viewing the Holocaust as an appalling crime, while simultaneously believing that genocide in Rwanda or Kosovo or Mesopotamia was not a Western concern. Vincent thought that was a good point, and Erin closed out her little opener by saying: ‘One of the most common arguments I hear—if you can even call it an argument—is that US foreign policy is just a mechanism for promulgating “our” values. And so I put it to you that the ability to live without fear of mass murder is not just an American liberal affectation. It’s something everyone is entitled to.’

Faint applause, and Hogan talked over it, saying, ‘Well, that’s fine in principle, but I have to admit your support of the invasion of Iraq is something I just can’t get my head around.’