It was March, still winter, and there was plenty of snow on the ground, which meant that once the sun went down the temperature fell like a rock. Tonight a nasty wind was blowing too, and trudging back to the barracks with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his chin tucked into the neck of his parka, Grey felt like his face was getting slapped a hundred times over. All of which made him think some more about Bora-Bora, and those little houses on stilts. Never mind Zero, who apparently had lost his taste for fresh Easter Bunny; what Zero ate and did not eat was none of Grey’s business. If they told him to serve eggs Benedict on toast points from now on, he’d do it with a smile. He wondered what a house like that would cost. With a house like that, you wouldn’t even need plumbing; you could just step to the rail and do your business, any time of the day or night. When Grey had worked rigs in the Gulf, he’d liked to do that, in the early morning or late at night when no one was around; you had to mind the wind, of course, but with a breeze pushing at your back, few pleasures in life compared to taking a leak off a platform two hundred feet over the Gulf and watching it arc into the air before raining down twenty stories into the blue. It made you feel small and big at the same time.

Now the whole oil industry was under federal protection, and it seemed like practically everybody he knew from the old days had disappeared. After that Minneapolis thing, the bombing at the gas depot in Secaucus, the subway attack in L.A. and all the rest, and, of course, what happened in Iran or Iraq or whichever it was, the whole economy had locked up like a bad transmission. With his knees and the smoking and the thing on his record, no goddamn way they were taking Grey in Homeland, or anywhere else. He’d been out of work most of a year when he’d gotten the call. He’d thought for sure it was more rig work, maybe for some foreign supplier. They’d somehow made it sound that way without actually saying it, and he was surprised when he’d driven to the address and found it was just an empty storefront in an abandoned strip mall near the Dallas fairgrounds, with white soap smeared on the windows. The place had once housed a video store; Grey could still make out the name, Movie World West, in a ghostly formation of missing letters on the grimy stucco over the door. The place next to it had been a Chinese restaurant; another, a dry cleaner’s; the rest, you couldn’t say. He’d driven up and down in front a couple of times, thinking he must have had the address wrong and reluctant to climb from the air-conditioned cab of his truck for some pointless goose chase, before he’d stopped. It was about a hundred degrees out, typical for August in north Texas but still nothing you could ever get used to, the air thick and dirty-smelling, the sun gleaming like the head of a hammer coming down. The door was locked but there was a buzzer; he rang and waited a minute as the sweat started to pool under his shirt, then heard a big ring of keys jangling on the other side and the clunk of the unlocking door.