"You still being a--what did you call it--a baby spy?"

"I do that a bit."

"You working now, are you?"

"Yeah, I'm working."

He laughed.

"You lying sonofabitch!" He looked at Kelly and said, "Oops! Do you learn French at school?" He turned back to me and said, "You wouldn't need me if you were, you'd be getting somebody else to do it. You can't bullshit Big All" He looked at Kelly and said, "Franfais!" Then he looked back at me and said, "You still married?"

The Microsoft sound chimed as Windows 95 opened on his machine.

"Divorced about three years ago," I said.

"I haven't heard from her for about two years. I think she's living up in Scotland or somewhere, I don't know."

I suddenly realized that Kelly was hanging on my every word.

He winked at her.

"Just like me--young, free, and single! Yeah!" Big Al was one of life's really sad fucks; I was probably the nearest thing he had to a friend.

I handed him the backup disk, and it was soon humming in the drive. It wouldn't be long before I got a few answers.

By now there was a pall of cigar smoke filling the top quarter of the room. Between that, the Kouros, and the lack of air-conditioning, the room was close to unbearable. It was just as well we'd be moving from here the moment Big Al left. I checked outside by moving the curtain, then opened the window.

The first batch of documents came up on the screen, and I looked over his shoulder as he tapped away in the semidarkness.

I pointed at one of the spreadsheets.

"This is where I've got a problem. I haven't got a clue what that means. Any idea?"

"I'll tell you what we have here, Nicky." His eyes never left the screen.

"These are shipment and payment records-of what, I don't know." As he pointed to the screen, his finger touched it and squidged the liquid underneath.

"Never touch the screen!" he scolded himself as if he were telling off one of his students. He was really getting into this.

"See these here?" His voice had changed from that of a no-hoper to someone who knew his stuff.

I looked at columns headed by groups of initials like MON, JC, IN. He said, "They refer to shipments. They're telling you what's going where, and to who."

He started to scroll down the pages, confirming it to himself.

As he was looking through he nodded emphatically.

"These are definitely shipments and payments. How did you get into this, anyway? You're not exactly the world's greatest hacker, and there's no way these files weren't password-protected."

"I had a sniffer program."

"Wow! Which one do you have?" The computer nerd was coming back.

"Mexy twenty-one," I lied.

"That's shit! Oops, garbage! There are sniffers now that do it at three times the speed." He looked down at Kelly.

"That's the problem with the Brits. They're still in the Steam Age."

He was now out of the spreadsheets and looking at more file names.

I said, "This is another group of files I was having problems with. Can you decrypt them?"

"I don't understand," he said.

"Which files are you having trouble with?"

"Well, they're in code or something--just a lot of random letters and numbers. Any chance of you figuring it out?" He made me feel like a six-year-old child having to ask to have his shoelaces tied.

He scrolled down the file names.

"You mean these GIFs?"

he said.

"They're graphics files, that's all. You just need a graphics program to read them."

He tapped a few keys, found what he was looking for, and selected one of the files.

"They're scans of photographs," he said.

He leaned over and pulled open the pint of ice cream, reached for one of the plastic spoons, and started to dig in. He threw a spoon to Kelly and said, "You'd better get in here before Uncle Al finishes it all."

The first picture was now on the screen. It was a grainy black and white of two people standing at the top of a flight of steps that led to a grand old building. I knew both men very well. Seamus Macauley and Liam Femahan were "businessmen" who fronted a lot of fund-raising and other operations for PIRA. They were good at the game, once even getting a project backed by the British government to finance revitalization in Northern Ireland's cities. The whole scheme was designed to provide local employment. They convinced Westminster that if a community was responsible for its own rebuilding, there would be less chance of them then wanting to go and blow it up. But what the government didn't know was that the contractors could only employ people that PIRA wanted to work; those people were still claiming unemployment and social benefits, and PIRA was getting a kick back from letting them work on the sites illegally, so it was costing the government twice as much and, of course, the businessmen got their cut as well. And if the government's paying, why not blow more up and rebuild?

Without a doubt, PIRA had come a long way from the days of rattling its tin cups in West Belfast, Liverpool, and Boston. So much so that the Northern Ireland Office had established a Terrorist Finance Unit as a countermeasure in 1988, staffed by specialists in accounting, law, taxes, and computing. Euan and I had done a lot of work with them.

Big Al now opened and viewed a series of shots of Macauley and Femahan shaking hands with two other men, then walking down the steps and getting into a Mercedes.

One of them was the late Mr. Morgan McGear, looking very smart in a suit I was familiar with. The fourth man I had no idea about.

The photography was covert: I could see the darkness around the edge of the frames where they hadn't gotten the aperture right, but it was good enough for me to tell, by the cars parked in the background, that they were on the Continent.

I said, "Let's see the next one."

De Sabatino could tell that I recognized something or someone; he was looking at me, dying to know what, wanting to get in on the act. He'd had five years on the back burner, and now was his chance for a comeback.

I wasn't going to tell him jack shit.

"Let's push on."

There was another group of pictures that he opened and viewed, but these meant nothing at all to me.

Big Al looked at them. The big half watermelon was back on his face.

"Now I know what all those spreadsheets refer to."

"What's that?"

"fEstd es la coca, senorl Hey, I know this guy. He works for the cartels."

I was looking at a really smart-looking Latino in his early forties getting out of a car. I could tell by the surroundings that it was in the United States.

"That's Raoul Martinez," he said.

"He's part of the Colombian trade delegation."

This was getting more interesting by the minute. PIRA al ways claimed no association with drug trafficking, but the profits were too great for it to ignore. What I had in front of me now was close to admissible evidence of its direct involvement with the cartels. But that still didn't help me with my problem.

He looked through the pictures.

"You'll see Raoul with somebody else in a minute, I guarantee it." He flicked through a couple more.

"There you are: big bad Sal."

This other character was about the same age but much taller; he'd probably been a weight lifter at some stage, then ballooned out to maybe three hundred pounds. Sal was a big old boy, and very bald.

De Sabatino said, "Martinez is never without him. We used to do a lot of business with them in the old days. A nice man, a family man. We used to run cocaine up the East Coast, all the way to the Canadian border. We needed things evened out to ease the route--these guys did the necessary, and everybody was making money. Yeah, these fellas, they're all right. As we went through more picture files, I saw both men eating in a restaurant with another bloke, a Caucasian.

Big Al said, "I haven't got a clue who he is."

I was looking over de Sabatino's shoulder, concentrating hard on the screen.

Kelly perked up.

"Nick?"

"In a minute." I turned my head to Big Al.

"Absolutely no idea?"

"Not a clue."

"Nick?"

I cut in.

"Not now, Kelly."

Kelly butted in again.

"Nick, Nick!"

"Go back to the--" "Nick, Nick! I know who that man is."

I looked at her.

"Which man?"

"The one that was in the picture." She grinned.

"You don't know who he is--but I do."

"This one?" I pointed at Martinez.

"No, the one before."

Big Al scrolled back.

"Him! That one there!"

It was the white guy who was sitting with Raoul and big bad Sal.

I said, "You're sure?"

"I'm totally sure."

"Who is he?" After our experience with the video I expected her to nominate anyone from Clint Eastwood to Brad Pitt.

"It's Daddy's boss."

There was a long, palpable silence as I let it sink in. Big Al was sucking air through his teeth.

"What do you mean, Daddy's boss?" I said.

"He came to our house once for dinner."

"Do you remember his name?"

"No. I just came down for some water and he and a lady were eating with Mommy and Daddy in the dining room.

Daddy let me say hello and he said, "Big smile, Kelly, this is my boss!"

" It was a good imitation ofKev, and I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes.

Big Al joined the conversation in nerd mode.

"Whoa!