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could handle encryption programs, you wouldn’t have to use LUDs.”
    It took N a moment to figure out that the word was an acronym.
    “I hope you realize how much I envy you,” the contact said. “When you came down the trail, this business was a lot more individual. Guys like you made up the rules on the fly. I was hired because I had an MBA, and I’m grateful to help rationalize our industry, move it into the twenty-first century, but even now, when you have to dot every
i
and cross every
t
, fieldwork seems completely romantic to me. The years you’ve been out there, the things you did, you’re like Wyatt Earp. Paleface, I was honored to be assigned your divisional region controller.”
    “My what?”
    “Your contact person.”
    “One of us is in the wrong line of work,” N said.
    “It was a pleasure, riding through the Old West with you.”
    “To hell with you, too,” N said, but the line was already dead.
     
    Thirty-odd years ago, an old-timer called Sullivan had begun to get a little loose. A long time before that, he had been in the OSS and then the CIA, and he still had that wide-shouldered linebacker look and he still wore a dark suit and a white shirt every day, but his gut drooped over his belt and the booze had softened his face. His real name wasn’t Sullivan and he was of Scandinavian, not Irish, descent, with thick coarse blond hair going gray, an almost lipless mouth, and blue eyes so pale they seemed bleached. N had spent a month in Oslo and another in Stockholm, and in both places he had seen a lot of Sullivans. What he had remembered during the drive into the mountains was what had brought him to the French Pyrenees all that time ago—Sullivan.
    He had been in the trade for almost a year, and his first assignments had gone well. In a makeshift office in a San Fernando Valley strip mall, a nameless man with a taut face and an aggressive crew cut had informed him that he was getting a golden opportunity. He was to fly to Paris, transfer to Bordeaux, meet a legend named Sullivan, and drive to southwest France with him. What Sullivan could teach him in a week would take years to learn on his own. The job, Sullivan’s last, his swan song, was nothing the older man could not handle by himself. So why include N? Simple—Sullivan. He seemed to be losing his edge; he wasn’t taking care of the loose ends as well as he once had. So while N absorbed the old master’s lessons, he would also be his backstop, make sure everything went smoothly, and provide nightly reports. If Sullivan was going to blow it, he would be pulled out, last job or not. The only problem, said the man with the crew cut, was that Sullivan would undoubtedly hate his guts.
    And to begin with, he had. Sullivan had barely spoken on the drive down from Bordeaux. The only remark he made as they came up into the mountains was that Basques were so crazy they thought they were the sole survivors of Atlantis. He had dropped N off at the hotel in Tardets, where he had a room and a waiting car, with the suggestion that he skip coming over for dinner that night. N had spoken of their instructions, of his own desire to be briefed. “Fine, I give up, you’re a Boy Scout,” Sullivan had snarled, and sped off to his own lodgings, which were, N remembered once more as the Peugeot rolled downhill from the telephone booth, the Auberge de l’Étable.
    Though the inn had been roughly half its present size, the dining room was the same massive hall. Sullivan had insisted on a table near the lobby and well apart from the couples who sat near the haunch of mutton blackening over the open fire. Alternately glaring at him and avoiding his glance, Sullivan drank six marcs before dinner and in French far superior to the young N’s complained about the absence of vodka. In Germany you could get vodka, in England you could get vodka, in Sweden and Denmark and Norway and even in miserable Iceland you could get vodka, but in France nobody outside of