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liberating happiness, as when a tiresome family member finally leaves.
    Ana Grey was free to go, and take her baggage with her.
    For decades, the place had been a state unemployment office, and the Bureau had not done much to change it. I badged the on-duty, who buzzed me into a vestibule that smelled of old guns and wet plaster. Tired fluorescents cast a sallow patina along empty corridors that were laid forty years ago with sea green linoleum, now worn to the floorboards.
    Special Supervisory Agent Mike Donnato appeared wearing a trim charcoal suit, making things look a little less like a mental institution. Donnato, my old mentor on the bank robbery squad, had been pulled off his cases to act as contact agent, or handler, for Operation Wildcat. Management knew that Donnato and I make a formidable battery, like a pitcher and catcher who work together to control the game. This was no time to be fooling around with rookie matchups.
    He turned a corner and we fell into step, instantly in psychic sync. That’s the way it is with partners.
    “We finally got my father-in-law into rehab,” he said.
    “You’re a good man.”
    Donnato looked skeptical. His father-in-law is difficult.
    “The way you take care of him,” I insisted. “You’re responsible; you visit all the time—”
    “He had a catheter,” said Donnato dryly. “So it pops out.”
    “The tube?”
    “His penis.”
    Partners. No topic in the world, no place inside the other individual that you cannot reach out and touch.
    “Rochelle’s trying to help the nurse out,” he said of his wife. “Fussing with the sheets and stuff, and suddenly it’s right there.”
    I started to giggle. “What does she do?”
    “Her eyes get real big and she says,
I just saw my father’s penis!
”
    I lost it. Must have been stress. Donnato shook his head with wry despair. He enjoys getting a reaction from me. “We didn’t need
that,
I’ll tell you.”
    SAC Robert Galloway joined us.
    “The team is meeting downstairs. They want Ana to get her driver’s license first,” Galloway said. “Go see Rooney Berwick.”
    The brick exterior of the old unemployment office is just a shell for a top-secret laboratory in the center of the building, where Rooney Berwick and his cohorts manufacture high-quality, indisputable lies.
    The Rooneys of this world are shy. They never have a date for the movies; they work the concession stand. They are collectors. They store data banks in their heads. Ask them what year Samuel Colt patented the revolver. They shop for groceries at two o’clock in the morning, are semi-intimate with a couple of oddball associates, live in a garage apartment across from Mother, who still makes dinner for them every night. They are fifty-eight years old and their pants don’t fit, and they haunt comic-book conventions because they are lonely for a hero; the kind of loneliness that never bottoms out.
    Rooney Berwick may have been all those things, but on home turf in the FBI lab, sporting multiple ID tags, key rings, and belt-mounted eyeglass cases, he projected a kind of arrogant underground status. He had stringy white hair and an ovoid belly that bulged out of a black button-down shirt tucked into dusty black jeans as he sat on a bench with big boots planted, threading a flex light down the barrel of a gold-plated AK-47.
    He looked up. “Can I help?” he asked gravely.
    I told him I was a new undercover and needed a driver’s license. I asked what he was looking for inside the machine gun.
    “Trying to see the rifling.” He cocked an eye down the shaft. “Take a look?”
    “I’ve seen rifling, thanks,” I replied, referring to the spiral marks left by exiting bullets.
    “She isn’t loaded, don’t worry.”
    “It creeps me out to see anyone looking down a gun.”
    “Just trying to keep busy. My mom is dying. They’re not saying that, of course. She’s in the hospital, but it doesn’t look good.”
    When strangers stun you with this kind of