“You been away from Columbia for what, a year now?” Graham asked.

“About that. You sent me on a job, remember?”

Neal sure as hell remembered. They had sent him to London on a hopeless search for the runaway daughter of a big-time politico-just to keep his wife content and quiet-and he had screwed up and actually found her. She was hooking and hooked, and he had wrenched her off her pimp and the junk and delivered her to her mother. Which was what the Man wanted him to do, but the politician was sure as hell pissed off, so Friends had to pretend that Neal had screwed them over, too. And so he had “disappeared.” Happily.

“Can you do that?” Graham asked. “Just take off from gradu-ass school like that?”

“No, Graham, you can’t. Friends of the Family fixed it. What am I telling you for? You’re the one who fixed it.”

Graham smiled. “And now we’re asking you for a little favor.”

“Or you’ll unfix it?”

Graham shrugged a that’s-life shrug.

“Why me?” Neal whined. “Why not you? Or Levine?”

“The Man wants you.”

“Why?”

Because, Graham thought, we ain’t going to sit around with our hooters in our hands while you turn yourself into a hermit. I know you, son. You like to be alone so you can brood on things and get happily miserable. You need to get back to work and back to school-back with some people. Get your feet back on concrete.

“You and Pendleton are both eggheads,” Graham said. “The Man figures he’s been paying for your expensive education for jobs just like this one.”

Neal took a hit of scotch. He could feel Graham pulling in the line.

“Pendleton’s some sort of biochemist. I study eighteenth-century English Lit!” Neal said. Tobias Smollett: The Outsider in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Neal’s thesis title and a sure cure for insomnia. Except, that is, for eighteenth-century buffs. Both of them would love it.