Michael stands in a sky-blue suit, looking over a balcony railing that is clearly not his. You can tell because instead of a muddy, polluted canal, he's overlooking a sparkling hotel pool. "In the intelligence community," he VOs, "an invitation to meet at a hotel pool is an olive branch. The person you're meeting is offering you multiple escape routes, a crowd to mix in with, and the virtual certainty that no one's concealing a weapon in their bathing suit." Not to mention an excuse -- nay, a mandate -- for the cameras to linger on the bikinis even more than usual. "But if you're meeting the kind of guy who arranges coups d'état for a living," the VO continues, "it's still a good idea to bring backup." So why did he bring Fi? She joins him on the balcony to offer him a glass of champagne. Of course Michael is all business, much to Fi's irritation. "Why do we never come to these places for anything other than surveillance?" she complains. Given what we've seen of Michael's cash flow, I'm surprised he can afford it even for the surveillance. Scanning the crowd below through his binoculars, Michael ignores her question, but when she says Gilroy sounds as bad as the people who burned him, he corrects, "He's worse." According to Michael, Gilroy will sell anything for the right price, up to and including nuclear secrets. And his eBay rating is for shit. Which is kind of Fi's point, but Michael says he needs to find out what Gilroy's up to. "This man is a freelance psychopath, and I'm the only one in a position who can do anything about it." He leaves her on lookout so he can go check out the scene at ground level. If he can ever climb down off that cross, that is.

Down at the pool deck, Michael wanders around, glances back up at Fi with her binoculars on the balcony, and hears someone sitting under a cabana saying, "Westen," in a British accent. He's a baby-faced fortysomething in a linen suit, and although I don't recognize the actor, Chris Vance, he was apparently the star of last year's Fox series Mental. Which means you probably don't recognize him, either. He smiles up at Michael as the subtitles tell us this is "Gilroy -- Freelance Psychopath." Michael walks over and Gilroy offers to shake hands, but then clamps onto Michael's and waxes creepy about how he thinks hands, not eyes, are the windows to the soul. Never misses an opportunity to be creepy, I see. Michael boasts that he's never been afraid to get his hands dirty, and Gilroy says that's what he'd heard. So it looks like Michael is embracing his burned side for this interaction. They flirt briefly, Gilroy bad-mouths Americans as "sheep," and Michael says the two of them have a lot in common. Gilroy says that's what he heard from none other than Tom Strickler. "You know him, don't you? Oh, that's right -- you shot him." Michael gets a little more serious, but when Gilroy asks him why he did it, Michael recovers in time to say he was just eliminating the middleman. Gilroy gets that, but says it also attracted a certain CIA agent's attention to Strickler's business -- that business being Gilroy. "You arranged to have him fall out of a fourth-story window," Michael realizes. Okay, mystery solved! Can Michael get a job at Radio Shack or something now? Oh, we're only a few minutes into the episode, so I guess it's going to have to play out. Gilroy wonders why Michael was there, and since Michael can't exactly say he came to protect Diego and just showed up too late, he says he was Strickler's business, too. With Strickler out of the picture, Michael suggests the two of them work together. Gilroy likes the idea, but his only concern is that Michael was once rather a boy scout, which does not fit with what Gilroy's working on. Whatever that is. Michael smiles that he got nowhere as a boy scout. "That's why I live by a new code: 50 percent up front." Not ready to buy yet, Gilroy misquotes Rogers & Hammerstein: "I'm still getting to know you. Getting to know all about you. And your little girlfriend up there," he adds, nodding up at Fi. Just as Fi realizes they're looking up at her, a sniper bullet hits the champagne bottle next to her, presumably fired from the high-rise hotel a half-mile a way. She gives Michael a dirty look, which Michael relays to Gilroy, with interest. "Champagne's on me," Gilroy quips. No, I think its on Fi.