There were people here and there, but the campus was quiet in midsummer. He went through the basement of McDowell and out into the little quad. There was Randall Hall, where he had lived—given a single room even though he was only a freshman, largely because they could not imagine anybody who had written an entrance essay like his successfully living in close proximity to another person. He’d written on Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. In those days, he had been a fiercely ardent Catholic. How long ago that was, the days of the skinny kid with the close-cropped hair and the delicate wire glasses.

He wondered why he had come here. Was it because he was dying, and the inner man knew it? He’d seen many an operational death that started with just this kind of official abandonment. I will not go to prison, he told himself as his eyes counted windows to his old room. How small Randall Hall looked now. He remembered it as a grand place. But look at it, you could almost jump over the damn thing. A vampire probably could, or come close.

He’d gotten to this place on the back of a hell of a scholarship, the Stephens Piper Award for Scholastic Diligence. Full tuition to the college of his choice.

He thought to himself, How do I kill vampires, now that I am alone? Dare I assemble my people? No, they’d all be stopped at their ports of entry.

He’d signal Becky not to come back—stop at the college library, see if they had a public computer. He’d send her an e-mail, using the team’s own emergency code. She could share it with the ones still in Kuala. He went over to the library, which was wide open and, typical of St. John’s rather tangential approach to organization, totally unmanned.

He booted up the computer behind the librarian’s counter. No password needed, of course. St. John’s was still St. John’s. It wasn’t that they were especially trusting. It was details—they avoided them. Was it the best college in the United States? Not by all standards, but by any standard at all, it was the most intellectually healthy.

His opinion. He opened up Outlook Express and logged onto their server. One code he’d never expected to use was “sourball express.” It meant the unthinkable, that CIA had turned against the operation and everybody needed to go to ground immediately, wherever they happened to be.

When she saw it, she would go into meltdown, but she would do her duty. He typed the words. Then he added, “Go to B.” There was a guaranteed job, given his recent casualties. Bocage understood American intelligence very well. He’d give her a good home.