Richards couldn’t say for sure; the order had come from the liason at Special Weapons. But if he had to guess, he would have bet it had something to do with the sweaty cot and soup-encrusted hot plate and a year without sunshine or fresh air, with the bad dreams and the Red Roof and all the rest of it. Hell, if you looked at the situation carefully—something he’d long since stopped bothering to do—it probably all went back to the bookishly pretty Elizabeth Macomb Lear, long battle with cancer, et cetera, et cetera.

“I called in a favor and had the purge done from Langley. Systemwide, soup to nuts. From a big-box perspective, Carter is already nobody. He couldn’t buy a pack of gum.”

Sykes frowned. “Nobody’s nobody. There’s always someone who’s interested.”

“Maybe so. But this guy comes close.”

Sykes lingered another moment at the doorway, saying nothing, both of them knowing what the silence was about. “Well,” he concluded, “I still don’t like it. We have a protocol for a reason. Three prisons, thirty days, then we bring him in.”

“Is that an order?” A joke; Sykes couldn’t give him an order, not really. That he could was a pretense Richards only indulged.

“No, forget it,” Sykes said, and yawned into the back of his hand. “What would we do, return him?” He rapped the side of the door with his hand. “Call me when the van gets here. I’ll be upstairs, not sleeping.”

Funny thing: when Sykes was gone, Richards found himself wishing he’d hung around. Maybe they were friends, in a sense. Richards had been on bad jobs before; he knew there was a moment when the tone changed, like a quart of milk left out on the counter too long. You found yourself talking as if nothing mattered, like the whole thing was already over. That was when you got to actually liking people, which was a problem. Things fell apart fast after that.

Carter was nobody unusual, just another con with nothing but his life to trade away. But the girl: what could Lear want with a six-year-old girl?

Richards returned his attention to the monitors and picked up the earphones. Babcock was back in the corner, chattering away. It was funny: something about Babcock always gnawed at him. It was as if Richards was his, like Babcock owned a piece of him. He couldn’t shake the feeling. Richards could sit and listen to the guy for hours. Sometimes he’d fall asleep at the monitors, still wearing the earphones.