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When she walked in the cafe, it was almost deserted. Samuels was sitting in a back booth, already nursing a huge mug of something. Alex steadied herself, and went to join him. He stood, ever the gentleman, taking her coat and shaking her hand. The calm before the storm, she supposed.

She sat, and ordered, before he said anything. "Thanks for coming, Cabot," he said. Then, as if reconsidering, he corrected himself. "Alex."

"Not a problem," she said. She was wary, and on alert, as noncommittal as possible.

"We have a problem," he said. "Though you're obviously aware of that."

"Yes, sir."

"Colin, please," he said. "We're going to get down to brass tacks here, so let's dispense with the formalities, okay?"

"Okay," she said.

"You've put me in a hell of an awkward position," he said. She opened her mouth, an apology of some sort forming on her lips, but he put up his hand to silence her. "Let me talk first. You're really going to want to hear what I have to say, I promise you."

She nodded, took a sip of her coffee, and waited.

"I should fire you," he began. "By all rights, you should be out on your ass. You know it, too, right?"

She nodded again, confused by what sounded like a reprieve being handed to her.

"And I was prepared to do it. I couldn't decide if I was going to call you, or make Pat do it while I was in Albany," he said. "You really screwed me over, Alex. What were you thinking?"

"You told me to," she said, referring to their conversation in his office in mid-December. Her logic was unswerving, and she stuck to her guns. He had to admit it reminded him of someone.

"Yeah, I guess I did," he said, and laughed a bit. "I'll give you that. You're a lot like I was coming up through the ranks. I should have known you'd see that as a dare."

"I didn't do it just for the sake of throwing you under the bus. I thought there was a larger issue there, and the Mayor was using you, and your office, to cover up something that wouldn't look good in his polls."

"You don't know the half of it."

"Pardon me?"

"Well, as you might imagine, I spent most of last week figuring out how to deal with you. And I'd just about decided. Then, on Friday, after I got back into town from the conference, I had a call from an acquaintance in Brooklyn," he said. "And he told me some very interesting things. It's a long story, but I think you're going to want to hear it."

Alex leaned forward, despite herself, anxious to hear whatever he was going to say. "I'm all ears."

Two hours later, driving home, her head was throbbing. What he had told her was so insane that it had to be true. He'd declined to name the acquaintance in Brooklyn, but the DA seemed to trust the person implicitly, and the story spoke for itself. The mayor's son Jeffrey, who Olivia had been told was working with the government in China, was actually working for a government contractor in China, a distinction that would prove very important in the tale the DA spooled out for Alex.

Jeffrey was making money doing some dirty work for the US in China, and making even more money on extracurricular activities. And he was using the 8th Precinct—more specifically, some dirty officers in that squad—to do it. Jeffrey was friends with Tim Harper, the precinct's lieutenant—had gone to boot camp with him and served together in Korea for a year. Both men got out after only a few years, Jeff to sign on with Axelrod, one of the major US government contractors in the Pacific Rim, and Harper joined the NYPD. He'd advanced through the ranks, finally coming to join the 8th just a few years earlier. Jeff's postings with Axelrod had seen him in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, before being sent to China in 2010.

Like his father, Jeff Grant was smart, and shrewd. He'd done his job there, and kept his head down, while piecing together lots of information that wasn't strictly necessary for his job. Pharmaceuticals were big business in China—and getting bigger. The health care system in China, like most everything else in the behemoth military industrial complex, was fragmented and inefficient. There were thousands of manufacturers, but little government oversight. There were few intellectual property protections there, and the government didn't provide much incentive for the producers to follow the laws. If you weren't going to make much money in China, then, why not make it outside of China.

Jeff Grant had looked at all of this and had seen an opportunity: American pharmacies, especially those online sellers who were discounting, needed to make every dollar they could. If they could buy the drugs cheaper—and you can't get them cheaper than the ones Grant was moving from China—then you made more money. He easily found several customers for the product he could smuggle in. Meanwhile, on the front end, he was paying the Chinese manufacturers far more than they'd get for their products there. In exchange for what he paid them, he received partial ownership in the companies themselves. He knew the Chinese were planning to crack down, to dramatically reduce the number of manufacturers and distributors, and he had inside information as to which ones were on the chopping block. He did all of his business with those that would survive, via government connections and healthy bribes.

With his friend, Harper, Jeff had set up a very efficient import operation. They had operatives in customs, and they used the off-duty officers of the 8th Precinct to move the product. They dangled a portion of the proceeds to the dirty cops who would do the work and shut their mouths, hauling in a healthy second income themselves while securing their futures with the ownership stakes they were accumulating in the Chinese companies.

The officers involved in the ticket probe were, for the most part, not involved in this deal; they were simply benefiting from the fact that their Lieutenant was willing to tolerate their corruption to cover up his own. But Alex had been right—there was much more fire than smoke. The smuggling operation came to the attention of a federal informant, and the FDA took the lead on the case. They had used Samuels' friend in Brooklyn to make a connection with him, needing locals on the case but not sure who to trust.

Now, Alex found herself in the middle of a case so big she couldn't wrap her arms around it: police corruption, drug smuggling, and a host of other felonies. She wondered, for the umpteenth time since she moved to Major Case, what in hell she'd gotten herself into.