Graham took the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. He was enjoying himself immensely. Aggravating Neal was almost worth the terrifying flight over, the endless trip to Yorkshire, and the hike up that damn hill. It was good to see the little shit again.

“If he doesn’t want to come back, he doesn’t want to come back,” Neal said.

Graham tossed back the whiskey.

“You have to make him want to,” he said.

“You mean ‘you’ in the collective sense, right? As in ‘one would have to make him want to.’”

“I mean ‘you’ in the sense of you, Neal Carey.”

All of a sudden, Neal Carey felt a lot of sympathy for Dr. Robert Pendleton. Each of them was shacked up with something he loved-Pendleton with his woman and Neal with his books-and now they were each being pulled back, kicking and screaming, to the chickenshit.

Because of him, they get me, Neal thought, and because of me they’ll get him. It’s all done with mirrors. He reached for the bottle and poured a healthy drink into his coffee cup.

“What if I don’t want to?” he asked.

Graham started rubbing his fake hand into his real one. It was a habit he had when he was worried or had something unpleasant to say.

Neal saved him the trouble. “Then you’ll have to make me want to?”

Graham was really working on the hand now. Pissing Neal off was fun, but extorting him wasn’t. However, the Man, Levine, and Graham had agreed that Neal had been shut up with his books too long, and if they didn’t get him back into some kind of action, they would lose him. That happened sometimes; a first-class UC-an undercover guy-would be put on R-and-R after a tough job and never come back. Or, worse, the guy would come back dull and rusty and do something stupid and get hurt. Happened all the time, but Graham wasn’t going to let it happen to Neal. So he had come to fetch him for this dumb, chicken-shit job.