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whispering about you, you know.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œYeah. They’re saying you had your butt kicked out of Senegal and got fired by ICT.”
    Trey was quiet.
    â€œThey basically disappeared you, except you ended up here instead of Guantánamo.”
    This was true enough. A short flight on a military airplane and Trey had been in Dakar, three hours after that he’d left Senghor Airport on a Senegal Airlines 747, and less than seven hours later he’d disembarked at JFK.
    Feeling disoriented. More disoriented than he’d ever felt before, and he’d been traveling his whole life.
    And also curious. When he’d gotten into trouble before, he’d always known why. But not this time.
    He brought himself back and looked at Jack. “ICT can’t fire me, since I don’t work for them.”
    â€œThey can stop giving you assignments.”
    This was true as well.
    Jack blinked. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Trey, you’re, like, famous. You’re the guy who always does whatever the hell you want, and always gets away with it.”
    Trey closed his eyes. He saw the wet gleam of the ivory white stinger. The agonized monkey. The wasp hovering just in front of his face, deciding whether he should live or die.
    He opened his eyes again to find Jack staring at him. “Shit, Gilliard,” he said, “what the hell happened out there?”
    Trey said, “Get your pencils.”
    *   *   *
    JACK WAS A brilliant draftsman. Two centuries earlier, he might have been an itinerant artist-scientist, traveling the world with paints and collecting jars. Producing works like those that now hung on the office walls. A John James Audubon of the insect world.
    But those times had passed. In the modern era, his artwork was known only to those who read his journal articles. And to his friends, who were often faced with the challenge of finding the perfect place in a small apartment to hang a portrait of, say, a tarantula-hawk wasp attacking its prey.
    Over the years, Trey had often seen—but not captured—insects that didn’t yet exist in the scientific literature. Jack’s crystal-clear reproductions based on his descriptions had existed long before actual specimens were collected, when they were at all.
    Knowing the drill, Jack sat down behind his desk, rummaged, pulled out his case of artists’ pencils and a sketch pad. Then looked up and said, “Okay. A bee?”
    â€œWasp.”
    A gleam in Jack’s eye. He loved wasps. “How big was it?”
    Trey held his thumb and forefinger three inches apart.
    Jack’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Come on, Trey.”
    Trey’s fingers didn’t move.
    â€œYou sound like a civilian, the kind who mistakes a housecat for a mountain lion.”
    Trey said, “But I’m not, am I?”
    â€œNot what?”
    â€œA civilian.”
    Jack stared at him, and now there was a kind of desperation in his expression. “Trey, the largest known wasp on earth,
Scolia procer
, isn’t that big!”
    He made a gesture over his shoulder at one of the old prints hanging on the wall. It showed a fat black-and-yellow wasp whose wings extended from its back like an airplane’s.
    â€œThat’s not what I saw,” Trey said.
    â€œI know! But—”
    â€œThe ones I saw were bigger,” Trey said. “Can we get started?”
    Jack drew in a breath. His face was a little red. After a moment, though, he lifted a hand and held it over the pencils. “Okay,” he said. “Color and shape of the body?”
    â€œBlack,” Trey said. “Skinny like a mud dauber. Arched abdomen.”
    Sitting in an old armchair across from the desk, he spoke. For twenty minutes, the only sounds other than his voice were the distant hum of traffic down on the street, the scratch of the pencils, and Jack’s questions making sure he was getting the