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least twelve others of whom we know. I’m talking about spontaneous human combustion.”
    Darling lowered her voice although nobody was around and they were speaking directly to one another. “There have been others?”
    “This is top secret, Stella.”
    Darling flashed a nervous grin. “Why Otto?”
    “He was a smoke jumper in college. He was a volunteer fire fighter for the Poudre Canyon district before he joined the Army where he was a military policeman and became a certified arson investigator. He has extensive counter-espionage experience but most importantly he has something we call the X-factor, the ability to do the totally unexpected and get results.”
    Darling smiled ruefully. “That’s for sure. We were at St. Exupery one night and there’s a foreign couple eating a table away. They looked Middle Eastern. Waiter brings their meal, Otto gets up, goes over, grabs the white linen tablecloth and yanks it out from under the dishes. Of course, not being a magician everything on the table went with it. Then he turns to the freaked out couple and says, ‘I’m so sorry. I thought I could pull it off.’
    “I had to pay for their meal and the broken dishes. ‘What the hell?!’ I said to him as soon as we got out of there. Tells me the man was an Al Qaeda agent and they were listening in on us.”
    Yee’s small black eyes sparkled. “I never heard that.”
    “I had to pay the staff a couple hundred to shut them up.”
    “You don’t happen to know the name of the unfortunate diners he interrupted?”
    “No, I’m sorry.”
    “Did he ever regard you with suspicion?”
    Stella looked surprised. “Me? Never. That’s one thing about Otto. ‘An elephant’s faithful one hundred per cent.’ An old-fashioned Boy Scout. It killed me to break it off with him, but what could I do? He was hallucinating ninja out of the woodwork. Every time we met he dumped my purse upside down on the table.”
    Yee glanced at the Gladstone. “That thing?”
    “Sam gave it to me. I call it my purse.”
    “This incident at St. Xupe. Was this before he was hospitalized?”
    “Right before.”
    “You never visited him. Why was that?”
    A crease marred Stella’s forehead as she realized NSA would have access to the hospital’s visitors logs. A tingle of paranoia zipped down her spine. Were they tracking her?
    “I was afraid it was me who was causing him to act crazy. Otto never does anything halfway. When he fell in love with me it was more Othello than Love’s Labors Lost . I wanted him to get over me. I still do. I have no idea what would happen if I suddenly showed up out of nowhere. And believe me, it is nowhere. It might throw him into an emotional tailspin.”
    Yee trained her lasers on Stella. “It’s the President who’s asking. Will you go get him? Ask him to come in?”
    Stella inhaled deeply and let it out. It had been over two years. “Of course.”
    Yee blinked revealing nothing. She smiled. “I knew we could count on you. When’s the memorial service?”
    “It’s not a service, it’s a wake, and don’t come if you don’t like drunk Irishmen. It’s Saturday at two at Chiklis, upstairs in the private dining room.”
    Yee signaled the waiter, caught his eye, and made a little writing motion with her hand in her palm. She turned back to Stella. “I’ll bring a bottle of Irish Mist.”
    ***

CHAPTER NINE
    “Vision Quest”
    Monday.
    Wiry juniper covered the ledge like steel wool, gin aroma stirring dark memories of Otto’s youth. He smelled sage and water from the creek below. Otto hunkered just below the rim, right arm over Steve’s neck snugging the big dog close. Steve was part Alsatian, maybe some border collie and otter. Otto held a pair of Zeiss binoculars. He set them carefully on the rock shelf and looked sixty meters across the canyon to a ledge, ten meters above the gushing stream coming off the mountain. It was there, three weeks ago, he’d spotted Max.
    He called the cougar Max out of