wars of independence, hundreds of French slave owners had arrived from Cap Haitien with their property and slaves. Vodoun and various forms of the French language persisted there.
The site listed her publications: a short history of St. Trinity, a study of French colonial settlement in West Africa and the Caribbean. It went on to advertise a hotel, apparently owned by her family in All Saints Bay, in the south of the island. And it listed a number of books by her brother, John-Paul Purcell, an authority on Caribbean religious practices. He had written and published a great deal. Lara herself sat on the board of some corporations doing business in the tropical Americas. She seemed also to connect with an entity called AbouyeCarib.com .
This site, however, was guarded by a square patch appearing in the middle of Michael's screen demanding a password. The patch was intricately designed and vaguely forbidding. He had come late and resistant to the world of the Internet, only a little less phobic about it than his wife. His one feat of electronic athleticism had consisted of decrypting the password on his son's computer, which was Falo, the dog's name backward, in defiance of dyslexia.
His plan had been to meet Cevic for lunch so they could go over whatever he had printed from the Web. There was not very much. Crossing the welter of slush and freeze between his office and the door of the deli restaurant in town, he instead decided to keep the handful of documents to himself.
Over barbecued beef, Norman complained about the college bureaucracy. He had spent the morning as the faculty representative on a committee that worked with the college employees' union. Michael listened impatiently.
"What do you think," he finally asked Cevic when they had finished their sandwiches, "about the presence of the intelligence community on campus?"
"Aha!" Norman said. It was the sort of question he relished on a topic he enjoyed. It would be hard to tell, though, how much he really knew about it.
"Are they here?"
"Oh yeah," Norman said. "They're here all right." But it would have been strange if Norman had said they weren't.
"Like," Michael asked, "where?"
"Well, you ask our new colleague about that. She works out of the late Ridenhour's shop, does she not? And Professor Doctor Ridenhour's department is surely the answer to your question. I mean," Norman said, "this is interesting. The other day I send you off to frolic with Lara. Now you're asking me about spookery. How about
you
tell
me
what prompts this question?"
"I just thought she had a very cosmopolitan background for a rustic setting like our own."
"Well, now I'm hurt," Norman Cevic said. And of course he was. Ahearn had never learned to pay enough attention. "I like to claim something of a cosmopolitan background. I've come a long way from Iron Falls. But here I am."
"You're a regional specialist," Michael said, rousing himself to flattery. "You're here for your own research. It's different with ... Ridenhour's people."
Cevic appeared to be mollified.
"You know I worked abroad during the war," he said. "I worked all over the world at one time. The Michigan Project. Aid for International Development."
"That's why I'm asking you this question, Norman."
"Ridenhour had his great days," Norman said. "Tucked away here in the toolies but with friends at court."
Norman played with the expensive pack of cigarettes he had bought at the smoke shop in town. There it was forbidden to light one. Since he had briefly considered resuming smoking, Michael was discovering it was no longer possible to smoke anywhere. Norman held forth.
"By the late seventies the intelligence people had lost their hold on the eastern universities. Except for locations like Yale, where they were built into the bricks—but even there they had to be truly covert. So places like this flourished. You couldn't recruit in the big places—the other side made it a conscious strategy, manipulating bodies in campus
The site listed her publications: a short history of St. Trinity, a study of French colonial settlement in West Africa and the Caribbean. It went on to advertise a hotel, apparently owned by her family in All Saints Bay, in the south of the island. And it listed a number of books by her brother, John-Paul Purcell, an authority on Caribbean religious practices. He had written and published a great deal. Lara herself sat on the board of some corporations doing business in the tropical Americas. She seemed also to connect with an entity called AbouyeCarib.com .
This site, however, was guarded by a square patch appearing in the middle of Michael's screen demanding a password. The patch was intricately designed and vaguely forbidding. He had come late and resistant to the world of the Internet, only a little less phobic about it than his wife. His one feat of electronic athleticism had consisted of decrypting the password on his son's computer, which was Falo, the dog's name backward, in defiance of dyslexia.
His plan had been to meet Cevic for lunch so they could go over whatever he had printed from the Web. There was not very much. Crossing the welter of slush and freeze between his office and the door of the deli restaurant in town, he instead decided to keep the handful of documents to himself.
Over barbecued beef, Norman complained about the college bureaucracy. He had spent the morning as the faculty representative on a committee that worked with the college employees' union. Michael listened impatiently.
"What do you think," he finally asked Cevic when they had finished their sandwiches, "about the presence of the intelligence community on campus?"
"Aha!" Norman said. It was the sort of question he relished on a topic he enjoyed. It would be hard to tell, though, how much he really knew about it.
"Are they here?"
"Oh yeah," Norman said. "They're here all right." But it would have been strange if Norman had said they weren't.
"Like," Michael asked, "where?"
"Well, you ask our new colleague about that. She works out of the late Ridenhour's shop, does she not? And Professor Doctor Ridenhour's department is surely the answer to your question. I mean," Norman said, "this is interesting. The other day I send you off to frolic with Lara. Now you're asking me about spookery. How about
you
tell
me
what prompts this question?"
"I just thought she had a very cosmopolitan background for a rustic setting like our own."
"Well, now I'm hurt," Norman Cevic said. And of course he was. Ahearn had never learned to pay enough attention. "I like to claim something of a cosmopolitan background. I've come a long way from Iron Falls. But here I am."
"You're a regional specialist," Michael said, rousing himself to flattery. "You're here for your own research. It's different with ... Ridenhour's people."
Cevic appeared to be mollified.
"You know I worked abroad during the war," he said. "I worked all over the world at one time. The Michigan Project. Aid for International Development."
"That's why I'm asking you this question, Norman."
"Ridenhour had his great days," Norman said. "Tucked away here in the toolies but with friends at court."
Norman played with the expensive pack of cigarettes he had bought at the smoke shop in town. There it was forbidden to light one. Since he had briefly considered resuming smoking, Michael was discovering it was no longer possible to smoke anywhere. Norman held forth.
"By the late seventies the intelligence people had lost their hold on the eastern universities. Except for locations like Yale, where they were built into the bricks—but even there they had to be truly covert. So places like this flourished. You couldn't recruit in the big places—the other side made it a conscious strategy, manipulating bodies in campus
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