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may very well be suing the government.”
    “Lord help you,” she said. “I hope you haven’t been skimming on your taxes.”
     
    THE PIKE PLACE MARKET bustled with the lunch crowd. People in the Northwest knew to get outside when good weather materialized, and the day had dawned cold and clear, though ominous dark clouds gathered to the north. Sloane took a seat at a wrought iron table on the deck of the Coco Cabana and sipped an Arnold Palmer, lemonade and iced tea, while looking down on the open-air market where fish vendors barked out orders and crowds gathered to watch them toss huge salmon.
    Charles Jenkins had called on his cell phone to let Sloane know he was going to be late due to traffic from freeway construction. The big man had lived like a hermit in a four-room caretaker’s shack on Camano Island for thirty years until, two years earlier, Joe Branick had also sent him a package. Inside had been a classified CIA file compiled largely by Jenkins, one that he had long thought had been destroyed. Jenkins had ultimately handed Sloane that same file when the two men met on a West Virginia bluff overlooking the darkened waters of Evitts Run, a tributary of the Shenandoah.
    “Joe meant for you to have this,” Jenkins had said. “Hopefully it will answer some of your questions.”
    “Can you tell me what happened?” Sloane had asked.
    “You sure you’re ready to hear this now?”
    “I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to hear it, Mr. Jenkins. But I don’t have a choice. I have no idea who I am.”
    Jenkins told Sloane of a village in the mountains of southern Mexico where a young boy, Sloane, was giving speeches so moving the people were referring to them as “sermons.” Southern revolutionaries were promoting the boy to be the one to lead them from poverty and oppression and restore a proud and independent Mexico. Unfortunately, the uprising coincided with the Middle Eastern oil embargoes, and the United States, in need of an alternative fuel source, could not allow the uprising to destabilize its relationship with the Mexican government. Jenkins had been the CIA field officer tasked to infiltrate the village and report on the boy.
    “I filed a report after each visit,” he had told Sloane as they watched the moon shimmer off the water’s blackened surface. “I convinced them that the threat was real, that you were real.”
    What had resulted was an assault on the village by a U.S. paramilitary force, and a massacre. Sloane had miraculously managed to survive, but not before witnessing horrible atrocities, including the rape and murder of his mother. When Joe Branick and Charles Jenkins entered the smoldering remains of the village the following morning, they found the boy hiding and decided to keep him hidden. They created a new identity, David Allen Sloane, a seven-year-old who had died in a car accident, forged adoption papers, and placed him in a foster home in Southern California. Then Jenkins, too, went into hiding, moving as far from Langley as he could, to the horse farm on Camano Island.
    For nearly thirty years they had both lived in anonymity.
    When the waitress returned, Charles Jenkins towered behind her. Jenkins was like the container ships that passed Sloane’s home. Big enough to block out the sun, he caused waves wherever he went. When he removed his wraparound sunglasses, revealing sparkling green eyes—uncommon for a man of African American descent—women swooned.
    “Can I get you anything to drink?” the waitress asked, beaming.
    Jenkins pointed to the glass in Sloane’s hand. “Bring me whatever he’s drinking. What are you drinking?”
    “An Arnold Palmer,” Sloane said.
    Jenkins gave it a disapproving frown. “As long as it doesn’t come with an umbrella,” he said, causing the waitress to giggle as she left. He sat rubbing his bare arms. “What do you have against sitting inside?”
    “How long have you lived here and you don’t wear a jacket?” Sloane was