“Eh?”

“Call me Tommy. All my friends do.”

Spencer frowned at him in a way suggesting that he most assuredly did not consider Karr to be a friend. “Young man,” he repeated. “If the oil companies were paying me, perhaps I could afford to buy their product. Secondly, global warming is not nonsense. It is real. All too real. My solar model simply demonstrates that human activities have little effect on the world’s climate.”

“Sure,” Karr agreed. “So people can drive gas-guzzling SUVs all they want and not melt the ice caps, right?”

“Tell me,” Spencer said, glaring at him over the top of his glasses. “Are all FBI agents as irritating as you?”

“Well-”

But Spencer had produced a copy of American Scientist he’d purchased at a kiosk inside the JFK terminal, and made a production of opening it and beginning to read.

“Jeez, Tommy!” a voice boomed inside his head. “Lay off the poor guy, how ’bout it?”

Karr chuckled in answer but didn’t say anything out loud. Spencer glanced at him suspiciously, then returned to his magazine. Like all Deep Black field operatives, Karr had a minute speaker surgically implanted in his skull just behind his left ear, and he also had a microphone sewn into the collar of his pastel blue shirt. The transmitter hidden inside his belt linked him via satellite with the Deep Black nerve center deep beneath Fort Meade, Maryland, the Deep Black command center within OPS 2 known as the Art Room, to be precise.

“Everything look okay at your end?” the voice continued.

Karr glanced around the first-class cabin. Three other men in plain, dark suits had taken their seats, along with the other first-class passengers. FBI, all three of them, though all were taking care not to meet one another’s eyes. The economy-class passengers were filing past, now. The agents surreptitiously watched each as he or she entered the plane and walked down the aisle.