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brisk purpose of people desperate to get warm again.
    Scott himself seemed comfortable, though I knew to him anything below sixty-five degrees was, by his own definition, "freezing." We were both Californians by birth, but Scott was from SoCal, and grew up spending his after-school hours and weekends catching waves along the lower Pacific Coast. He's got four years on me, wears glasses, has two earrings, and looks perpetually ready to hit the beach at the drop of a hat. But for his suits, which are uniformly blue or gray, you'd be hard-pressed to tell just by looking at him that he works for the FBI.
    "You were out of town," Scott said. "The lovely Skye. Nicely done."
    "What the hell are you talking about?"
    "It's in the paper. 'Seen canoodling at The Grey Moss Inn outside El Paso, Texas, smoldering starlet Skye Van Brandt and celebrity protection specialist Atticus Kodiak.' "
    "Whoa," I said. "Backup. What?"
    "Page Six. The
Post.
There's a copy on the backseat." Scott was grinning like he'd snuck a mouthful of some very tasty and forbidden treat. "Bridgett know?"
    I was twisting around for the paper, finding it already folded open to the celebrity gossip pages. There was a small file photograph of Skye, and the copy was pretty much as Scott had quoted with the addition that, "Van Brandt's publicist denies any involvement between the two."
    "This is utter crap," I said.
    Fowler laughed, negotiating the merge onto the FDR. "They make all that shit up anyway. You'd never be caught dead canoodling anyone at The Grey Moss Inn."
    "Wait until tomorrow," I said. "They'll run a story saying that she and I had a fight and that we're 'headed for Splitsville.' "
    "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. You and Skye were so good together."
    "Shut up and drive." I tossed the paper back behind the seat. "Did something happen?"
    "No idea. The SAIC just told me that the Backroom Boys wanted to see you again, and could I get you into the office this morning. I told him I'd try."
    "That's it?"
    "If I knew anything else, I'd tell you, Atticus," Scott said. "Probably more of the same. Somebody somewhere found something someplace and they're hoping you can shed light on it."
    "Here we go again," I muttered.
    "Here we go again," Scott agreed.
* * *
    We parked in the garage, and then Scott led me up into the Federal Building, where I got my visitor's pass and was escorted past the metal detectors, then into the elevator and up to the Bureau offices. What had once seemed a maze of corridors and turns had now become familiar, and we went past the pictures of the President, the Attorney General, and the Director, walking along floors carpeted in gray and blue, passing agents and secretaries until we reached the same conference room as every time before.
    They were waiting for us inside, already seated, six of them this time, which was the most who had been present for quite a while. There were five men, three of them at the table, two seated with their backs against the far wall, and one woman, also at the table. The man at the head of the table was Hispanic and in his fifties, with a stack of file folders to one elbow, and I pegged him for American before he spoke, either CIA or NSA or State, though the odds were he wouldn't identify himself as such. To his right sat two more men, both Asian. The woman was to his left, black, perhaps shy of fifty, and when she spoke, her accent was South African. The men seated at the back were both white, but the lights were dimmed for the presentation, and I didn't get a good look at their features.
    These were the Backroom Boys, and so far they had never been the same group twice. This was the sixth time I'd been summoned to appear before them in the last eleven months, and I was resenting it like hell right now. The first couple of times hadn't been so bad; there'd been a novelty value, and I'd been eager to help the cause of international law enforcement, to offer what small insight and experience I could. Now, even if the