The first time I clapped eyes on Jeffrey Donovan, he already looked familiar to me somehow. This was years ago, but suddenly this week it hit me: he looks like a taller version of Guy Pearce without the manorexia. A Hulk Pearce, if you will, only not green. I'll try to maintain my interest despite the fact that with this realization, the real mystery of Burn Notice has been solved, as far as I'm concerned.

We catch up with Michael, spending a little private time in his loft with that crossword puzzle Carla left him at he end of the last episode. As the Michael VO lectures us about "steganography," or the art of sending coded messages that don't look like messages unless you have the key, Michael flips back and forth to the puzzle. It turns out it's a coded message whose key consists of little windows cut out of the page in front of the puzzle that reveal individual letters, allowing Michael -- or a clever rhesus monkey -- to decode it. "MEET AT MARINA MALL NOON." is the message Michael comes up with. I hope he got his little windows lined up right and Carla wasn't actually telling him to MAKE A VANILLA MALT DOOD.

The next day, Michael parks the Charger in the middle of a right-turn lane next to the mall in question. He, Sam, and Fiona hop out as Michael instructs Fi to tail Carla if she leaves. Fi suggests, "There's room in the trunk." Michael nixes that and leaves her in position with the car while he and Sam enter an open-air mall, the latter carrying a big flashy digital camera. Sam frets about a meeting of his own he's got to get to, but Michael already knows Sam's only got a Pilates class with his girlfriend Veronica. Sam acts all whipped and even blames Michael for getting him in trouble in the first place. This despite the fact that Michael waded into the fortified hideout of a heroin smuggler to save Sam after a job went bad that Sam picked in the first place, but Michael doesn't have time to do anything but tell Sam to make sure to get a photo of Carla while they're there.

As Michael trolls the mall, he VOs that you always want to be the one setting the meeting, because that puts you in control. Funny, Michael's not usually the "do as I say, not as I do" type. But I guess there's not much he can do about it now. I notice that Sam has been imprudent enough to skyline himself and the camera in the background, but we'll get to that. Suddenly Carla calls out to Michael from behind him. She's sitting at a table all friendly-like with a go-cup in front of her and a freeze-frame subtitle under her face: "CARLA -- THE NEW HANDLER." She offers him a drink, and he starts fishing for clues right away by saying, "I'll have what you're having." She reveals that she's drinking some kind of Yemenese (sic) coffee that she brewed herself, because you never know what's in restaurant drinks. So now we know she's paranoid and pretentious. She thanks him for meeting her at the mall. "Work has been so busy I haven't had time to shop," she says. Michael asks for her boss's number so he can call and straighten that out, which of course doesn't fool Carla. She just hands him a little paper shopping bag. Inside is a credit-card sized piece of laminate plastic with computer chips and holograms visible inside. Fanciest security badge I've ever seen. Pretty hard to get an illicit copy, I'd suspect, which of course is what she wants done. Without telling him where she got it or what it's for, she directs Michael to contact the one counterfeiter in Miami who can do the job, a Tunisian named Nefzi. And Michael's going to be approaching Nefzi on his own, with instructions to have the original and the copy back in two days. Michael asks if that's all he needs to do to clear up the burn notice. Yes, Michael. You were burned overseas in the field during a live operation, then shipped back to Miami, given untold levels of surveillance, and spared any number of assassination attempts, all so Carla could have a copy of a security badge. Seriously, I think not, and Carla straightens him out on that pretty quick. "But there are rewards to playing nice," she adds, handing him another shopping bag that contains five figures in cash and adding that he can keep the change after paying Nefzi. As she stands up, she casually asks, "Looking for Sam?" Michael endeavors to shrug innocently, but indeed, Sam is no longer in that obviously skylined spot where we last saw him. And as a beefy guy approaches the table with the Sam's digital camera and the car keys Michael gave to Fi, Carla says she brought friends, too. She assures Michael that Sam and Fi are fine as she pockets the chip from the camera and drops the camera itself on the sidewalk. "Next time, kids stay home," is her exit line. I hope Nefzi doesn't mind buying Sam a new camera.