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procedure. Besides, all it would probably get him was one of those irritatingly charming smiles Trotter was currently using on the stewardesses.
    Joe didn’t dare go to sleep, even after they’d changed planes in Chicago and there was nowhere Trotter could go before they got to Dulles, short of hijacking the plane. Trouble was, if Joe went to sleep, Trotter probably would hijack the plane. Just to show Joe he could do it. So, tired as he was, Joe stayed awake, watching Trotter through slitted eyes, only to get twitted about it as the plane was coming down.
    As soon as they were in the terminal, Trotter said, “Call the office.”
    The guy really was a chameleon. To look at Trotter now, you would never believe the owner of that face was capable of smiling and bantering with stewardesses. Giving orders, though, seemed perfectly natural. Joe irritated himself by starting to move his head to look around for a phone, then said, “Nobody said anything about you giving orders.”
    Trotter looked bored and, for the first time, as tired as Joe was. “Right,” Trotter said. “Please call your office, okay?”
    “There was nothing about that, either.”
    “What did they tell you to do, bring me right in?” Joe said nothing, but it didn’t matter, since Trotter didn’t wait for an answer. “Sure, they had a good night’s sleep, probably in their own beds. Guys like us have to be Superman.”
    “Guys like us?”
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” Trotter said. “Who are you supposed to report to?”
    Joe looked at him.
    Trotter started to laugh. “No, it’s not a test, and I’m sorry to bring it up with all these people walking by.” He lowered his voice. “Rines, right? No, don’t tell me, I’ll tell you something. They told you to find me and bring me, but not a word why, and now you don’t know whether, as my daddy frequently says, to shit or go blind.
    “So I’ll help you. I’m supposed to be briefed on something, but I’m too tired to take it in. Also, my teeth hurt.”
    “Your teeth hurt.”
    “Right. So let’s go to a phone. You call in and tell them if they swear to God that it can’t wait until—what is it now, six-thirty A.M .?—you tell them that if it can’t wait until three this afternoon, I will come in, but I won’t like it, and I won’t be good for much. If they won’t swear to that but insist I come in, I am going to disappear, find some aspirin and a bed, and see them at three o’clock, anyway.”
    “Unless I stop you,” Joe suggested.
    “Unless you stop me, of course. You’ll have to shoot me to do it, the way I feel now. I know you guys always shoot to kill.”
    “You sound like you’re daring me to.”
    “Joe—can I call you Joe? I just don’t care.”
    Joe looked into the man’s eyes and saw only truth. Trotter was no older than Joe was, but his eyes were ancient.
    “Where’s a phone?” Joe said. Trotter pointed, and they made their way through morning shuttle commuters to a pay phone on the wall.
    A half hour later Joe was checking them into a Holiday Inn. The last thing Joe heard before he got into bed was Trotter shooting the bolt on the connecting doors. He had a flash of alarm, then remembered Rines’s voice on the phone. “Sorry, Albright, we should have told you. You can trust Trotter. Do whatever he wants. We’ll see you this afternoon.”
    Amazing. This guy had some kind of juju on the brass. Not only does he get carte blanche, but he gets one of the Bureau’s top men apologizing to lowly field hand Joe Albright.
    Joe didn’t know what he’d gotten into, but it promised to be educational. In the meantime, they told him not to worry, so he didn’t worry. He went to sleep.

Chapter Five
    T ROTTER WALKED INTO A fifties-vintage glass-and-turquoise-fronted building in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was as anonymous a place as you could find, one of two dozen or so interspersed among the fast-food places along the first two miles outside the D.C. line. They housed