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“From now on, you’ll be known as Agent Juno, and your identification code word is Akron.”

“Fine,” she said.

“Report to 150North Los Angeles Street in downtown Los Angeles as soon as possible.”

“Los Angeles Street in Los Angeles? Seriously?” Annie said. “That sounds fake.”

Zach whimpered, then let out a loud wail. Either she didn’t hear the man’s response or the baby drowned out his voice.

“Okay, I’ll get there when I can get there. And for the record, I’m from Toledo, jackass.”

She hung up.

So much for sleeping in. Instead, she was cradling someone else’s baby in a stranger’s kitchen in the middle of the night. She picked up a pacifier that was lying next to a crayon drawing of an airplane on the kitchen table, rinsed it off under the kitchen tap, and put it in Zach’s mouth. He took it, sucking noisily.

She had to go, no matter how exhausted she was, but she obviously couldn’t bring this baby with her. She walked over to the closed bathroom door and knocked lightly. “Professor?” She heard the sink running. She knocked again. “Helen?”

Helen opened the door. Her eyes and nose were red.

“Annie, I am very sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“It’s all right. Zach seems calmer now. A little fussy. Aren’t we all?”

Helen took him and patted his back lightly. “He never sleeps.”

“I’m sorry,” Annie said. “I’d stay and help, but I have to go.”

“Go? It’s the middle of the night. Were you on the phone?”

“I was. I can’t explain it to you right now.”

Helen stared at her. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” she said. “Good luck with Zach.”

Maybe it was rude, but she didn’t owe Helen an explanation. She’d already paid the month’s rent in cash, and it wasn’t like they were friends.

She dug through the plastic drawers that she was using for her clothes and pulled out a pair of black slacks and a light pink button-down shirt. She’d once had a professional wardrobe, but most of it was still in Ohio because there hadn’t been space in the car for everything. Besides which, she thought she wouldn’t need it. She buttoned up the wrinkled shirt, put her hair up in a ponytail, and pulled on her jean jacket. She applied lip gloss and mascara, then decided she was too tired to care about makeup and grabbed her coat and her bag. When she went around the side of the house to get to her car, she saw that the kitchen light was now off.

She turned on the dome light and studied the map in her car, but getting downtown wasn’t actually difficult, and the building was easy to find because it was large, well lit, and clearly identified as the Parker Center with tall letters on a massive sign. It still had some damage from the Rodney King riots—broken glass on the asphalt, scorch marks on its side—although judging from the fresh paint, some repairs had been made. She had been summoned by the Los Angeles Police Department, currently the least popular agency in the city. It was hard enough to convince her parents that UC Berkeley would be safe; Los Angeles had been a much harder sell. As far as Ken and Patty Weaver were concerned, Los Angeles was still rioting five months after the brutal beating of Rodney King. She could hardly blame them for their fears.

The attack on King—and the riots that had followed—had seriously undermined the LAPD’s authority, and it made sense that they’d call in outsiders to help, especially if another agency was footing the bill. Annie had read that the cost to repair the damage to Los Angeles would be over one billion dollars. The city was busted up and broke, and Annie had been recruited to do their dirty work. Not unlike Berlin or Leningrad or… It just seemed as if the America that Annie was living in was not the America she’d been raised to believe in.

In the lobby, Annie showed her Virginia driver’s license to the cop at the front desk. She should have gotten an Ohio one when she moved home, but the DMV hadn’t been high on her list, and after only a couple of weeks, it still didn’t seem that important. Registering for classes, finding shelter, and answering mysterious government pages in the middle of the night really ate up one’s time.

The desk sergeant made a show of looking up her name and writing down her information before he finally slid a visitor’s pass over to her, telling her at least three times not to remove it.

She clipped the pass to her jacket pocket. “Do you know where I’m supposed to report?”

He sighed and pulled the clipboard back over, the wood screeching along the countertop. “Fourth floor,” he said.

He didn’t offer to call and let them know she was coming, and she didn’t suggest it. Maybe the element of surprise would work in her favor. Give her a chance to scope out the place and the people before they asked her to do something awful.

The elevator opened to cuffed men standing in the hallway and shouting from down a hall where she couldn’t see. She stepped out of the elevator and waited, her purse slung across her chest and her hands in her jacket pockets, taking note of burly men with tattoos on their arms, others in leather vests, bored-looking officers in blue uniforms so dark they were practically black, andone man wearing a tired gray suit and a thick red tie. He looked up and spotted her. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“I believe I’m here to help you,” she said, projecting her voice without raising it, gave him an easy smile, and gazed at him from under her dark eyelashes. She had no intention of showing how nervous she was. Easy, breezy.

Her heart hammered.