It takes a lot to down a Forrester. More than a couple of months stuck in a Minnesota prison, that's for sure.

Okay, so she'd spent two years recovering in an asylum, and then another one recovering from the recovery (they'd done everything for her there except fix her fear of open spaces, so she'd called in a favour from her hippie days and worked on a shrimp trawler until she got over that herself). And her heart isn't as strong as it once was, and occasionally she gets crippling flashbacks- but really, Mike Forrester is fine.

Just fine, thanks.

Certainly fine enough to work at the INS, where everybody else is also completely bananas.

There's Tony, the editor, who threatens about once an hour to quit and go into his brother-in-law's Venetian blind business. Every half-hour, if Kolchak's around. There's Ron, who uses a gay, debonair manner to cover for his gay and terrified personality. There's Miss Emily, whose reaction to having a tough guy come in and start waving a gun around was to ask what caliber it was, so that she could put the incident into her next novel.

And then there's Carl Kolchak, who is just something else again.

"Rules, Miss Forrester. Find the rules of your story, and it'll write itself."

He refuses to call her Mike, so she calls him Mr Kolchak. It's a standoff. She sips her rancid pink gin, watches him drink his water and lemon.

"Ruled paper, in fact. For instance," and he takes off his hat, fans himself with it (the bar's radiators are stuck on full, and the place is roasting despite the frigid February air outside). "I will assure you with a faith based on long and bitter experience, that the moment- the very moment- that the pattern begins to fall into place, Tony Vincenzo will be seized by an overwhelming desire to distract you with some ridiculous society story. Or an article on juvenile ballet, or painted Eastern European eggshells, or some irrelevant frippery like that. If, that is, he hasn't already done so."

"As an editor..." Mike murmurs. Just to keep the conversation moving.

"As an editor, his only purpose," Kolchak says, knocking back his water like a shot, "is to provide you bail when the police find your fingerprints on the murder weapon. The zealous officers of the CPD don't always take the investigative process very well- in fact, if they are agreeing with you, you've undoubtedly gone astray. By the time your story's on the wire, there ought to be at least one sergeant baying for your blood."

Not exactly the sound journalistic advice she'd told him she wanted. But as her actual goal was mere entertainment, this'll do very nicely.

"So, don't worry about angering the police. What else?"

"Library fines!" he shouts, with a piercing shout that cuts through the surrounding conversations. Everybody looks at them; he waves his hat at them, with one of his slightly piquant lapses into self-depreciation. People mutter "Kolchak..." and turn back to their drinks with practiced indifference.

"For your background?"

"For your life! Never, ever fail to pay your library fines promptly. In fact, I have a standing donation with the Harold Washington Library for a thousand dollars from the expense account every year. Vincenzo thinks it goes to the policeman's ball."

That might have more to do with their attitude towards him than just pursuing deranged stories all the time. "Yeah, what you mentioned earlier about research, I'm still not understanding that. I mean, that story about the vampire-"

"The absolutely true facts, about the vampire."

"Right. Ah...there's a lot of different myths about vampires. Suppose your hooker sweetie had been the kind that reacts to garlic instead of fire? Then what?"

"Ah," he says. Stops, upends his glass, starts again. "A simple trick, the best kind- time consuming, but simple. You identify your subject, you look it up in the card catalogue, and then- you go to the stacks and find the book that wasn't listed. There's always at least one. Occasionally two, and on a bad day I found five, but usually just one."

Now he is starting to blither. "Books in a library that aren't listed in the catalogue? What's the point of that?"

"Plausible deniability. Suppose," Kolchak says, "that you're running a government agency that officially doesn't exist. A secretive branch of the civil service, that exists to track missions for every intelligence branch of the federal government. CIA. FBI. Secret Service. Naval Investigative Service, et cetera. They're ostensible paperwork pushers, who don't even have a budget for field work- but sometimes, they can't resist a little meddling on their own. So they employ the only weapon they have: bureaucracy. Enticing libraries across America to buy and lose the right kind of books for their agents to use at need."

This is the dumbest conspiracy theory she's heard since- well, since last Thursday, when a hot dog seller had been ranting to her about the plot to keep internal combustion engines on the streets. Maybe there's something in the Chicago air. "That Naval Service, that's a real thing?"

"It most certainly is. Trust me, you'll believe in it too after being held incommunicado for forty-eight hours on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan." He puts his hat back on, pushes his barstool back.

"This agency is starting to sound like a story in itself."

"Which is why I'm telling you all this. Because if it's between passing on my trade secrets to Ron, or an addled ex-reporter who's only been back on the job for six weeks, you're still preferable to Ron."

"Thanks so much for that vote of support."

"Also," Kolchak remarks, as he rises. "Any reporter can go insane. That's the easy part. But coming back again afterwards for the next story? And the next, and the next? That takes a certain dedication to the truth."

It's the closest thing to a personal statement he's ever made to her (damnit, she's a practiced reporter, why can't she construct any sensible picture of his interiority?) "I never mentioned that. Not even to Vincenzo."

"I make a habit of investigating the personal lives of all my acquaintances. You should too."

She still thinks he's mostly talking nonsense, until they go outside and find the photograph on the driver's seat of his Ford Mustang.

A blurred snapshot of the INS office from the outside, clearly taken by someone riding past on the 'L' train. With a message written on the back, in scented purple lipstick.

Better get your affairs in order. You won't see me coming.

Kolchak's looking understandably horrified.

"An instant Polaroid? What kind of maniac is this?"

"Um," Mike says, startles when she realises that he's seeking an actual answer. "An impatient one? A cheap one?"

"A cheap assassin...you see what this means, don't you? Who else, but the DXS? Which means," he adds, with a connoisseur's air of enjoying a fine vintage. "We're targets now. It's after us."

"Brilliant," she says, without thinking twice.

Maybe this was too soon. Maybe she ought to go check herself back into the asylum.

Nah.

There's the truth to hunt down. Sanity can wait.