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“Hey, I’m taking the train home to Orange,” Shear said. “Want to grab a beer or something at Union Station?”

Bosch hesitated, but not too long.

“Sure,” he said. “If we take it slow. I just got a new knee and I’m still breaking it in. Not to mention my insides still feel like I’ve got broken glass in there.”

“Not a problem,” Shear said. “We go slow.”

It took Bosch and Shear twenty minutes to walk from the Roybal to Union Station. Along the way, Bosch learned that Shear’s role in the task force was to identify illegally sold weapons and trace them back from their current owners to their origin in order to document how, when, and where the Spolu had gotten involved in their transport.

Bosch also learned that Shear was a Little League coach who had fulfilled every baseball enthusiast’s dream by attending a game in all thirty Major League Baseball parks — in the same season.

“Best food?” Bosch asked.

“I hate to say it,” Shear said, “since I’m a Dodger guy, but the Giants have it all over us when it comes to stadium food.”

Bosch nodded. He had suspected as much.

At the train station they went to a bar called Traxx and Bosch was relieved to sit down. Shear had an old-fashioned and Bosch ordered a beer from the tap. Finished with the get-to-know-you banter, Bosch bluntly turned things back to the task force and its mission.

“So what’s in Prague?” he asked. “And how come you’re not there with your partner?”

“Half the task force is over there,” Shear said. “Based in Prague because of the Spolu connections. Right now they’ve got eyes on a shipping container we’ve been tracking for thirty-two days. It went from the Port of Los Angeles to Antwerp and then by train down to Prague, where it’s sitting in a railyard. And they didn’t send us both over there because, like with everything else in the fed, there’s not enough money in the budget. We switch off going when one of us is needed over there. I have family, she doesn’t.”

“What’s in the shipping container? The missiles?”

“We think — actually, we hope so.”

“Where did the missiles come from and how did Novak get them?”

“They were stolen from the JFTB last year.”

“What is JFTB?”

“The Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos. It’s the National Guard training base for all of California, and they’ve got a fleet of twenty Black Hawk helicopters down there that they use for training and other utility purposes.”

“Okay, so if they’re trainers, they wouldn’t be armed, right?”

“You are correct, sir. But what is not widely known is that they’re not going to put twenty combat helicopters down there for training without being able to arm them immediately should the need arise. They don’t want to be caught flat-footed should there be some sort of attack on the West Coast. It would be like a cop running around with a gun but no bullets.”

“So what you’re saying is, there were Black Hawk weapons at the base and they got stolen by Novak?”

“There were weapons there, yes, but they were not stolen by Novak. The Bureau believes it was an inside job, and that’s a whole separate investigation this task force isn’t involved in, though I’m sure Cavanaugh talks daily to the agent in charge of that operation.”

“You’re saying we’re not sure how they got stolen, only that the Spolu and Novak came into possession of them?”

“Correct. And if we’re lucky, they’re safely held in that shipping container and we’re going to get them back without the world ever knowing a thing about it. That’s what you stumbled into, Harry, and that’s why they want you inside the operation rather than running around on the loose outside.”

Bosch nodded. He realized that Shear’s story fit with Ballard’s being told to hand over the Wonderland murder books, despite the order being contrary to department policy and procedure.

“Cutler said the missiles and other munitions were stolen,” Bosch said. “So what else are we talking about?”

“You realize that I should not be telling you any of this, right?” Shear said. “But the Bureau tends to keep people in the dark even when they need to know what’s going on to do their jobs well. You ask me, it bites them in the ass every time.”

“We called it mushrooming. They keep you in the dark and shovel shit at you.”

“Exactly.”

“So — the weapons?”