Save for the bartender, we were alone, which was one small consolation, anyway. Forrestal ordered a whiskey sour and a glass of water but I needed coffee, to help me stop shivering.

We sat at a small corner table by windows that provided a front-row seat on the rolling black clouds and white lightning streaks and sheeting rain turning the gentle hills of the golf course into a hellish surreal landscape. Forrestal, hair flattened wetly, sat back in his chair as if he were behind his big executive desk at the Pentagon, calmly sipping his whiskey sour. He looked like the elder of an elf clan, and a wizened one at that. He probably only had ten or twelve years on my forty-three, but looked much older.

“Nate,” he said quietly, “they’re after me.”

I tried to detect humor in his medium-pitched, husky voice, and could find none; no twinkle in the blue-gray eyes, either.

“Well, uh, Jim,” I said, and smiled just a little, “it seems to me ‘they’ already got you. You are out of a job.”

“You can lose a job and get another,” he said, and the slash of a mouth twitched in a non-smile. “But a man only has one life.”

Thunder rattled the earth, and the windows; cheap melodramatic underscoring, Mother Nature imitating a radio sound-effects artist.

“Have there been threats?”

He nodded, once. “Telephone calls to my unlisted number at home. Cut-and-paste letters.”

I gestured with an open hand. “But someone in your position always hears from cranks.”

Now he leaned forward conspiratorially, whispering, “Didn’t you wonder why I wanted to meet you here?”

“Hell no.” I waved to the rain-streaked window and the squall beyond. “Beautiful golfing weather like this?”