She spun on her heels but then paused. “You look good, Jon. It’s nice to see you not shuffling around like an old man.”

A moment later she was through the door and gone.

Smith pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and slid it across the desk. “I’ve got a little shopping list for you, Fred. You know. Just in case.”

Klein’s eyes widened when he read the note. “Jesus, Jon. I’m not sure America even has one of these anymore.”

“See what you can do.”

“I assume you don’t want it dropped in your garage.”

Smith shook his head. “Send it to the Okinawa air base and put it under wraps. Then hope to God we never get a chance to use it.”

34

34

CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
USA

Randi Russell hustled down the hallway, already late because of a number of wrong turns. It never ceased to irritate her that she could flawlessly navigate the tangle of ancient streets and alleys crisscrossing the Middle East, but every time she came to headquarters, she got lost. Of course, she set foot in Virginia rarely and then only when there was no other option.

She spotted the conference room she’d been searching for and picked up her pace a bit. The men waiting for her were the agency’s top minds on Japan and, in light of the shit storm going on in the Pacific, probably had better things to do.

Randi juggled her notepad and coffee, gripping the door handle and grimacing as she entered the room. She hated office buildings and everything about them. The smell, the fluorescent light, the cheesy artwork. But most of all, she hated the bureaucracy that incubated in them like bacteria.

The two men sitting next to each other behind the table didn’t immediately react to her arrival other than to stare. Not an uncommon reaction in the scheme of things. She’d met them in passing years ago but, by design, she was a bit of a ghost. And she’d apparently built quite a reputation based on a bunch of outlandish stories quietly passed around Langley’s back offices. Most weren’t true, of course. The vast majority of the CIA’s employees would never have the clearance to hear the even more outlandish real ones.

The man on the right suddenly leaped to his feet and strode around the table. The two analysts had picked up the nicknames Laurel and Hardy at some point, and the monikers seemed even more fitting now than when she’d first run across them.

“Randi, Randi…” Carl Rainsburg said, taking her hand and kissing it. “What a pleasure it is to see you again…”