Read it Jerry did, or at least glanced through it. “What’s Project Azorian?” he asked.

“It’s what you’re going to keep quiet about,” Fred told him: the first words out of his mouth since he’d barged into Jerry’s apartment. “Keep quiet about the name, too, whether you sign or not. Real quiet.” Both the other intruders nodded.

Project Azorian aside, the agreement was what John said it was. The word felony popped up a dismaying number of times. “Boy, you weren’t kidding, were you?” Jerry said.

“I never kid,” John P. answered. From some people, that would have been a joke. Jerry got the feeling the CIA guy meant it.

Which had nothing to do with the price of beer. Jerry walked over to the kitchen table, grabbed a pen that was sticking out from under some of the papers there, and scrawled his signature on the indicated line. He handed the agreement back to John. “Here you go. What did I just sign my life away for?”

John answered the question with a question of his own: “Have you heard about the ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer?”

“The ocean-mining ship? Yeah. Funny-looking thing! I saw it on the TV news when it sailed into … was it Long Beach or San Pedro?”

“Long Beach,” Fred said.

“Yeah. Long Beach,” John agreed. He glowered at Jerry. “Okay. Now you find out why you signed that paper. The Glomar Explorer doesn’t belong to Hughes. It belongs to us: to the Agency, the CIA. We don’t give a shit if it ever pulls up any manganese nodules off the seafloor. That’s just the cover story for what it’ll really be doing in the North Pacific, which is what Azorian is all about.”

“Riiight.” Jerry let the word stretch. He hated asking the obvious question, but he didn’t seem to have much choice. “What will it be doing there?”

“In February 1968, the Russians lost a submarine in those waters—the K-129,” John said. “It’s a diesel boat, but it was carrying missiles tipped with nuclear weapons, maybe torpedoes tipped with them, too. The ocean there is three miles deep: a little more, actually. They searched for it after they lost contact, but they didn’t know exactly where it went down. They looked for a while. Then they gave up and went home. We found it, though.” He looked and sounded smug.

The next obvious question was, How did you do that? Jerry didn’t ask it. Instead, he said, “SOSUS.”

Fred jerked as if somebody’d stuck him with a pin. “You aren’t supposed to know about SOSUS!” he yipped.

John was cooler. “Relax. He’s a marine biologist, remember? A marine biologist who does whales, no less. He’ll know.”