“I know.” Jerry thought about the photos in the manila envelope he’d passed to Tim Ishihara. In there with them was an account of what he knew about Humpty Dumpty, how it had been found, and how it had been raised. He also thought about termination with extreme prejudice. He’d never believed the CIA was kidding about that. He really didn’t believe it now. “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t go out the door in a hurry or something this morning and miss it.”

“Thanks. I mean it. Thanks! It’s good to know somebody cares,” Steve said. “And you were right before, I think. Way better not to talk about any of this on the phone or where too many people can listen in.”

“Uh-huh.” Jerry set money on the table and stood up. “I better get back. If I’m not there when Anna comes in, she’ll wonder why.”

“Okay.” Steve rose, too. “The fewer people who wonder anything about this, the better.”

“Amen!” agnostic-leaning-toward-atheist Jerry said, most sincerely.

He did get back to Hawthorne before Anna came home. It helped him less than he’d thought it would. When she walked through the door, the first thing she did was toss the Times’s front page on the couch so the story about trying to raise the Russian submarine was face up.

She pointed at the photo of the Glomar Explorer. “That’s the ship you were on, isn’t it? One of the guys in sales with me noticed it and gave it to me.”

“Yeah, that’s the ship,” he said—denying it would be worse. “I saw the story, too, up on campus. All I can tell you is, it wasn’t going after subs while I was on it.” That was true: just barely, but it was.

And Anna, of course, didn’t believe it. “Don’t bullshit me. I hate when people do that. I especially hate it when somebody I think I can trust does it.” She pointed at the paper again. “Are you gonna try and tell me that story’s a lie?”

A lot of it was, or at least wrong. Jerry could see, though, that insisting on that would only get him in deeper. So he said, “Babe, they built the Glomar Explorer in Philadelphia. They sailed it all the way down around South America, ’cause it’s too wide to fit through the Panama Canal. Then they brought it up again, to Long Beach. Whatever the hell they did out in the Atlantic, nobody said word one about it to me.” He blessed the Times reporters for screwing up the ocean where they thought the Glomar Explorer did its dirty work.

“Really?” The way his wife studied him made John P. seem like a rank beginner. But Jerry thought her voice held a little uncertainty. He sure hoped so.