He did abstractly admire the letter. No one who read it could have any idea what kind of project he’d been working on or what he’d done that the boss man so appreciated. The most even Sherlock Holmes would deduce was that it was something special, to have earned such a generous bonus.

He wondered if they’d bribed Steve the same way. It occurred to him that he could call the older man at the RAND Corporation and ask him. Half a second later, it also occurred to him that that wouldn’t be Phi Beta Kappa. Bonus or no bonus, from now on he had to figure the CIA was keeping tabs on him. Talking about Azorian on the phone, even with someone else who’d worked on it, might be dangerous. Talking about Midlothian or Humpty Dumpty might be worse than dangerous.

Up to the apartment he went, letter in hand. He stopped halfway up the stairs to the second level. “Huh!” he said thoughtfully. That hesitancy—hell, that fear—about talking too much on the phone must already have taken root in his mind. Otherwise, why hadn’t he told Anna about the money when he talked to her last night?

He started up the stairs again. When she came over, or when he went to her place … He shook his head. If they could bug his phone, they could bug his apartment, too. And hers.

“Christ,” he said as he unlocked his door. If he went on thinking this way, he’d end up as paranoid as Richard Nixon. Understanding fear of persecution from the inside out might prove useful to him as a writer. Any new experience might. All the same, he could have done without this one.

On Thursday, he went up to UCLA again to put in an interlibrary-loan request for a Japanese journal with a study of humpback migration patterns. The article was in Japanese, but it had a summary in English that would give him the gist. And maps showed the same oceans, regardless of language.

Interlibrary loans all went through the Research Library at the north end of campus. It would have been nice if he could have done this through the Biomedical Llibrary in his preferred part of the sprawling university, but no such luck.

At UCLA, science, engineering, and mathematical types mostly hung out in the southern part of the campus. The north was for English majors, would-be historians, students of foreign languages, and others even less likely than marine biologists to land jobs after graduating. There were more girls up there, but that was only of theoretical interest to him these days.