“You know who. The Directorate. Or whatever they’re going to call it.” He had lowered his voice, although not even the gecko staring at them from a rock three feet away could hear him over the water lapping and the flapping palm leaves.

“You just said they, not we.”

He held out hands. He couldn’t tell her.

“No?” she continued. “Then what exactly do you do here, if you don’t know a thing?”

Selfer seemed to think about that for a long time. He picked up his hat and stared at it. Set it back down, just so. He stared into the sand, his eyes widening like a kid trying to count all the granules. “It’s a valid question,” he said.

“You know what this says to me? Look at me. It means that this isn’t at all what you thought it would be when you took the job.”

He chuckled at that, but it wasn’t through a smile.

“Ho, you mainlanders,” she said through an equally bitter chuckle, “always trying to trade up for the next best thing.”

They heard laughing and tensed up, but it was just island boys far out on the rocks.

Selfer turned to her. “This is how we fund covert ops. All right?”

She stared at him. “Fund in what way?”

“Sometimes, things can’t be on paper, say, in reports, or part of a record.”

“Ah. Speaking of: I used to have a good friend in Honolulu,” she started to say but stopped—she’d almost said Frankie. She choked back the name. “Her name is Mae, Miss Mae to us. She’s Chinese. You ever hear of her?”

“No. But everyone has code names, so who knows?” He held up his pack of Camels and offered her one now. She declined. “This Miss Mae where you got that fancy lighter of yours?” he added.

“What lighter is that?”

“Oh, come on.” He grinned.

She stared at him, stalling. She held out a hand for his flask and he passed it to her. “Ho bruddah! Dis da basi? More better than French kine wine.”

“Atta girl,” Selfer said, suddenly sounding more like a streetwise sharpie and not the smoothie officer after all.

“Know what I know?” she said. “There are tunnels under here—there under The Preserve, I mean.”

“You know, or you hear? Who told you—Wendell Lett?”

“Mister Lansdale,” she said. She lied.

Selfer grunted. “It’s Major Lansdale.”

“He’s a major?”

“After a fashion,” Selfer muttered.

So he really did take orders from Lansdale, even though he outranked Lansdale—on paper anyway.

“What else did Lansdale tell you?” Selfer added.

“He told me I was to keep a certain important Japanese partner of his company. A thug.”

“Kodama. You don’t say? And Lansdale, he wanted you to extract information.”

“That his name—Kodama?”

“On second thought? No, it isn’t. You never heard it from me.”