“Over and over!” Marty Zellerbach said. “His phone is on and has signal and I know he’s there because the last three times, he declined the call.”

She glared at him.

“Jon?” Zellerbach said. “Are you there? Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

“Because I’m tired, Marty. I’m dead tired.”

“But there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“What is it?” Randi said.

“I don’t really want to say on an open line. It’s about that stuff you wanted me to look into. You know. With the thing?”

“Forget it,” Smith said. “Job’s over. Bill me.”

“I don’t want to bill you, Jon. I want to talk to you.”

“Email me the invoice, Marty. Put what you’ve got to say in the comment section. Or better yet, don’t.”

“But this is important,” he whined. “Forget payment. It’s free.”

He reached over to disconnect the call but Randi snatched the phone off the coffee table. “I’d love to meet with you, Marty. When and where?”

*  *  *

MAJOR JAMES WHITFIELD sat in his dark office listening to the voice of Martin Zellerbach.

“My place, Randi. Now. Yesterday. A year ago. Just get here.”

“I’m on my way.”

“What about Jon?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

The connection went dead and Whitfield leaned back in his chair. With Klein involved, it had been too dangerous to contact his friends at the NSA to get bugs on Smith’s and Russell’s phones. Fortunately, he also had people at AT&T who had been able to feed the unencrypted calls in real time.

He reached for his keyboard and brought up the now-archaic Google homepage, searching on the name “Martin Zellerbach.” LayerCake would undoubtedly have better-organized information, but it was impossible to know if Dresner was watching.

Wikipedia had a picture of a muscular, shirtless Zellerbach that looked suspiciously like it was taken from the cover of a romance novel. The text gave detailed accounts of his role in the defeat of the Nazi Germany, his improbably acrobatic sexual escapades with the entire cast of America’s Next Top Model, and his defeat of Chuck Norris in a bare-knuckles tournament. The fight was accompanied by a surprisingly convincing video and seemed to have taken place in the bar from Star Wars.

Impressively, every other link he clicked on corroborated those events.

Convinced he was getting nowhere, Whitfield dialed his organization’s tech guru and waited impatiently for him to pick up.

“Yes sir. What can I do for you?”

“I need you to get me some reliable information on a Martin Joseph Zellerbach. I ran an Internet search and came up with junk.”

“Marty Zellerbach? I don’t need to do a search, sir.”

“You know him?”

“Not personally. But I know of him. Everybody does.”

“Well, I’m not everybody. What have you got?”