"Uh, no. In fact, if you want the truth, Bryce's agent was the one who told Bryce to go to Bragg to get some help on being an action star. And we kind of told his agent to do that, too. And we got the Army to agree to it."

Wilder nodded, resigned to the situation. "If Finnegan's behind the movie, there have to be a shitload of legitimate contacts he's made. Why not just follow those?"

"Dead ends," Crawford said. "He's not dumb."

Nobody connected with that movie has any brains, Wilder wanted to say, but the jury was still out on Armstrong. And Nash wasn't stupid. "Tell me about Finnegan."

Crawford nodded. "James Finnegan. Seventy-three years old. His mother worked in the art museum in Dublin until she was killed in a cross fire. That's when he joined the IRA. Before 9/11, the IRA was getting a lot of cash in from the United States, and Finnegan helped them wash it by investing it in art. After that, Finnegan began freelancing, working for whoever paid him the most."

Wilder sighed. "A capitalistic terrorist. Great."

Crawford went on. "Finnegan disappeared off the intelligence radar until the Mexican authorities caught him in Cabo four months ago trying to take out some very rare and expensive stolen pre-Columbian artifacts from Costa Rica. Pornographic stuff. A bunch of jade dicks." He snickered, and when Wilder didn't join in, he cleared his throat and said, "Jade phallic symbols. Supposed to cure impotence and increase, uh, staying power."

Wilder resisted the urge to make wisecracks since Crawford was being juvenile enough for both of them. "It's a smart play. Use the dirty money to buy the art, then sell it on the black market and get clean money from the collectors in return. How much was the stuff worth?"

"The entire shipment would have been worth about five million without the Viagra factor. But if you believe the stuff will help you get it up, it's worth about fifty million. Finnegan's in his seventies. Maybe he believes." Crawford snickered again.

Just what I needed, Wilder thought. Beavis as my CIA handler. "But the Mexicans caught him."

Crawford nodded. "He paid them off and got away, but without the jade. Which leads us to DLDI."

Wilder shook his head. "He lost the art so now he's financing a movie? How does that help him?"

Crawford tried to look mysterious and just looked confused. "That's on a need-to-know basis."

Right. "Do you have a photo of him? For all I know he's already on the set, I just didn't get introduced to him."

"I'll get you a photo, but the odds are slim that Finnegan will ever set foot inside the country."

"Then why are you bothering me?"

"I told you. We need you to keep an eye on things. See if you can get a line on where Finnegan is."

Wilder sighed again. "What kind of backup do you have on call?"

The kid looked confused once more. " 'Backup?"

Fuck, this was like talking to Bryce. "You know, if the bad guy shows up. Do I call you to send in the troops? Or am I supposed to handle him? And how? Tie him up? Club him? Tell him he has nice eyes and buy him a drink?"

Crawford tried to look disapproving and just looked grumpy. "You call me if Finnegan shows."

"And?"

"And I'll handle it."

Right. Wilder took a deep breath and let it out. The odds of this kid handling anything were about the same as Finnegan showing up on the movie set, so it really wasn't an issue.

"I said, I'll handle it," Crawford said, a little louder, disconcerted by Wilder's silence when he really should have been happy about it.

"This is a pretty vague mission. You could have told me this crap on the phone in five minutes. Why'd you drag my ass here?" Wilder raised a finger as Crawford's mouth flapped open to answer.

The waitress glided in and put a mug of whatever local brew was on tap in front of Wilder. She glanced at the kid. ''You need a refill on that Coke?"

Crawford shook his head and she departed. Wilder was willing to bet it was Diet Coke.

"I wanted to meet you," Crawford said.

"Okay. Done it. Feel better? Bye."

Crawford placed both hands on the scarred table. Wilder could see the veins pulse as the kid pressed down, trying to regain control. "There's no need to be antagonistic. We're working together."

"What you mean 'we,' kemosabe?" Wilder picked up the mug and drained half of it in one smooth gulp.

"What?"

The kid liked that word, Wilder thought as he put the mug on the table. And he was too young to have seen The Lone Ranger, so the kemosabe crack was wasted. This was one shitty day. "Okay, we're working together. Work. Fell me about the people on the set who are most likely to be hooked up with Finnegan. The director-Lucy Armstrong." He felt a twinge or guilt asking about her, but she was the one in charge. "She just got on the set, but she's running things. What's her story?"

"I don't know."

Wilder spoke slowly. "That's your part of the 'we,' okay? Apparently, I'm the guy in the field whose ass is in a sling when things go to shit. You're the handler. You pump me for intel to report back to your boss, I pump you for intel so I can do my job. Dah? Nyet? Mosybyet?"

The Russian was lost on the kid. Wilder had seen the type before. The CIA sent a lot of their people down to Bragg to learn the abbreviated version of being a commando. Just enough info so they could justify carrying automatic weapons overseas and run hellholes like Abu Gharib. And let the military guys take the fall for it. He finished his beer and set the mug down on the table with a solid thump.

"I'll see what we have on Armstrong," the kid said, pulling out a pad and pencil from inside his jacket and exposing a shoulder holster with a small revolver in it.

Who the hell carries that kind of revolver? Wilder thought. From here it looked like a.38, a peashooter, not a Dirty Harry blow-a-limb-off-with-a-near-miss revolver like Nash had in his quick-draw rig. Jesus. "Find out about the first director, too, the one who died."

Crawford licked the end of his pencil and put it on the pad.

"Don't write it down," Wilder suggested. "Let's make believe we're running a covert operation here and we have to like, you know, keep secrets?"

"Right." Crawford scooped the pad off the table and jammed it back in his jacket.

That was better than "what," at least. Wilder held up the empty mug, his eyes going past Crawford's shoulder.

The kid frowned as the waitress came over with a fresh brew. "Do you think you should be drinking on duty?"

Had the kid just said what he had? Wilder rewound his brain, replayed it, and yes, the kid had. "First, I didn't know I was on duty until a couple of minutes ago. I was on leave and I am assuming I am not going to get charged leave time now." Wilder did not want to bring up the money Bryce was paying him. Screw the CIA.

"Second, I'm undercover. This is part of my cover." Wilder smiled, trying to be nice, but this nice shit was getting old. This kid was doing things as wrong as they were doing them on the movie, except this stuff was real. "Cover for action. You know, like they taught you at Langley."

"What, being a drunk?"

Was it the "what" or the sentence that pissed him off-or that he knew he'd been drinking too much since his last tour in Iraq? Wilder wasn't sure but his smile was gone.

The kid pushed his chair back slightly, looking wary. "Listen, I got thrown into this job just-"

"I don't give a fuck about your sob story," Wilder said, his voice flat. "You get me the intelligence I need to do my job. I want that picture of Finnegan and the files on Armstrong and the old director, along with anything else you have that ties anyone on that movie to Finnegan in any way. Yesterday."

He got up and walked out, leaving the beer and the kid behind, and then remembered that in two days he'd be hanging out of a helicopter and pretending to be Bryce while Althea screamed in a car below and pretended to care. Iraq or not, this was no time to give up drinking.

Should have finished that beer, he thought and headed back to the set to drop off the comic stuff at Armstrong's camper.

And then he was going back to the hotel to get a real gun.

The shoot wrapped at two a.m., and Lucy went down to base camp, exhausted by the chaos and worried sick about Daisy, who had sleepwalked through the rest of the night. An hour before, listening to Daisy slur her words, she'd thought, If it were anybody else but my sister, I'd think she was on something. Then she'd watched Daisy fumble with her notebook and stumble when she got off her chair.

Hell, she thought now as she opened the door to the camper. She's on something.

A big brown paper bag stamped jax comix was sitting on her table next to the script Stephanie had given her, with a Post-it note on the bag: "Captain Wilder left this for you." She sat down in one of the swivel chairs and pulled a big blue box from the bag and looked at the cartoon of a forties Wonder Woman on the front, something else inexplicable in her life, right up there with Daisy and Connor.

Then she remembered.

"Barbie," she said out loud and looked at the small print at the bottom of the box:exclusive wonder woman circa 1941 action figure. She'd told him Barbie and he'd thought "doll." And then he'd hunted this down. Poor guy.

Nice guy.

"I brought candy from Crafty," Pepper said, climbing up into the camper behind her, her hands full of Twizzlers and Hershey bars.