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position.”
    â€œYou have a gift for sarcasm, Miz Breen.” He took the phone book from her desk. “Please feel free to practice it on me whenever you want.”
    â€œIt takes the fun out of it, if you give me permission,” she said.
    It took ten minutes to find out that Reuben and Cecily Malich lived in a housing development off Algonkian Parkway in Potomac Falls, Virginia.
    Cecily Malich sounded cheerful on the telephone when he introducedhimself as Major Malich’s new subordinate. Or whatever his job description was supposed to be.
    â€œHe gets a captain again?” she said. “How interesting.”
    â€œIt might be,” he said, “if I knew anything at all. Such as when he’s expected back in the office.”
    â€œWhy, hasn’t he been in lately?”
    â€œI’ve been here three days and have yet to meet him.”
    â€œInteresting,” she said.
    â€œI don’t even have enough information for my lack of information to be interesting,” said Cole. “I hoped you could enlighten me about a few things. Like what we do here in this office.”
    â€œIt’s classified.”
    â€œBut I’m cleared to know it.”
    â€œBut I’m not,” she said. It was nice of her to leave off the “duh.”
    â€œSo you won’t help me? I just want to make myself useful to him, and I don’t know how I can do that if he doesn’t come in to the office. I’m not sure he even knows that he has a new captain assigned to him.”
    â€œOh, he knows,” she said.
    â€œHe mentioned it?”
    â€œNo,” she said. “But he makes it a point to know everything about the people who work with him, including the fact that they work with him. Believe me, he knows all about you and my guess is he specifically asked for you in this assignment.”
    That was gratifying, even if it was only a guess. “But what
is
the assignment?”
    â€œI assume you already asked around the office.”
    â€œNobody knows. Nobody
cares
.”
    â€œThat’s because he doesn’t report to anyone they know.”
    â€œWho
does
he report to?”
    â€œWell, clearly he doesn’t report to me or you.”
    â€œMrs. Malich, I’m drowning here. Throw me something that floats.”
    She laughed. “Come out to the house. I’m a cooky-baking wife and it’s summer vacation. Chocolate chips or snickerdoodles?”
    â€œMa’am, anything you offer will be gratefully received.”
    It was more of a house than Cole would have expected on a major’s salary, though still hardly a mansion. There were four bikes on the front lawn, two of them tiny with training wheels, which suggested that the kids were home from some sort of expedition.
    â€œNo, I only have little John Paul here,” she said, indicating the three-year-old who was studiously drawing something with crayons at the kitchen table. There were, as promised, chocolate chip cookies on a cooling rack.
    â€œI just thought, with the bikes on the lawn . . .”
    â€œThe kids have been told to put their bikes away. Often enough that we refuse to remind them again. They know that any bike that is stolen from the front yard will
not
be replaced by us. So there they sit. Reuben will mow around them before he’ll move them an inch.”
    â€œSo he does come home often enough to mow the lawn.”
    She looked at him like he was crazy. “Reuben is home every night, except when he’s traveling, and he’s never gone for more than a few days. It’s really been quite nice since he got this Pentagon assignment. It’s a far cry from the days when he’d be gone sometimes a year at a time, with only a few messages.”
    â€œThat must have been hard.”
    â€œI take it you don’t have a wife,” said Mrs. Malich. “Or you’d already know all about it.”
    â€œI’m Special Ops, like your