"He just got partial access to one of the government systems in Washington. He found out they put a federal agent in here. Undercover. At first they assumed it was you. Then they checked a little further and found out it was a woman and she's actually been here for weeks."
I stared at her, not understanding. Teresa Daniel was off the books. The government computers knew nothing about her. Then I remembered Duffy's laptop, with the Justice Department logo as the screensaver. I remembered the modem wire, trailing across the desk, going through the complex adapter, going into the wall, hooking up with all the other computers in the world. Had Duffy been compiling private reports? For her own use? For postaction justification?
"I hate to think what they're going to do," Elizabeth said. "To a woman."
She shuddered visibly and looked away. I made it as far as the hallway. Then I stopped dead. There were no cars. And twelve miles of road before I would even begin to get anywhere. Three hours' fast walk. Two hours, running.
"Forget it," Elizabeth called. "Nothing to do with you."
I turned around and stared in at her.
"Forget it," she said again. "They'll be doing it right now. It'll be all over soon."
The second time I ever saw Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl was the third day she worked for me. She was wearing green battledress pants and a khaki T-shirt. It was very hot. I remember that. We were having some kind of a major heat wave. Her arms were tanned. She had the kind of skin that looks dusty in the heat. She wasn't sweating. The T-shirt was great. She had her tapes on it, Kohl on the right and US Army on the left, both of them kicked up just a little by the curve of her breasts. She was carrying the file I had given her. It had gotten a little thicker, padded out with her notes.
"I'm going to need a partner," she said to me. I felt a little guilty. Her third day, and I hadn't even partnered her up. I wondered whether I'd given her a desk. Or a locker, or a room to sleep in.
"You met a guy called Frasconi yet?" I said.
"Tony? I met him yesterday. But he's a lieutenant."
I shrugged. "I don't mind commissioned and noncommissioned working together. There's no regulation against it. If there was, I'd ignore it anyway. You got a problem with it?"
She shook her head. "But maybe he does."
"Frasconi? He won't have a problem."
"So will you tell him?"
"Sure," I said. I made a note for myself, on a slip of blank paper, Frasconi, Kohl, partners. I underlined it twice, so I would remember. Then I pointed at the file she was carrying. "What have you got?"
"Good news and bad news," she said. "Bad news is their system for signing out eyes-only paper is all shot to hell. Could be routine inefficiency, but more likely it's been deliberately compromised to conceal stuff that shouldn't be happening."
"Who's the guy in question?"
"A pointy-head called Gorowski. Uncle Sam recruited him right out of MIT. A nice guy, by all accounts. Supposed to be very smart."
"Is he Russian?"
She shook her head. "Polish, from a million years ago. No hint of any ideology."
"Was he a Red Sox fan up at MIT?"
"Why?"
"They're all weird," I said. "Check it."
"It's probably blackmail," she said.
"So what's the good news?"
She opened her file. "This thing they're working on is a kind of small missile, basically."
"Who are they working with?"
"Honeywell and the General Defense Corporation."
"And?"
"This missile needs to be slim. So it's going to be subcaliber. The tanks use hundred and twenty millimeter cannons, but the thing is going to be smaller than that."
"By how much?"
"Nobody knows yet. But they're working on the sabot design right now. The sabot is a kind of sleeve that surrounds the thing to make it up to the right diameter."
"I know what a sabot is," I said.
She ignored me. "It's going to be a discarding sabot, which means it comes apart and falls away immediately after the thing leaves the gun muzzle. They're trying to figure whether it has to be a metal sabot, or whether it could be plastic. Sabot means boot. From the French. It's like the missile starts out wearing a little boot."
"I know that," I said. "I speak French. My mother was French."
"Like sabotage," she said. "From old French labor disputes. Originally it meant to smash new industrial equipment by kicking it."
"With your boots," I said.
She nodded. "Right."
"So what's the good news again?"
"The sabot design isn't going to tell anybody anything," she said. "Nothing important, anyway. It's just a sabot. So we've got plenty of time."
"OK," I said. "But make it a priority. With Frasconi. You'll like him."
"You want to get a beer later?"
"Me?"
She looked right at me. "If all ranks can work together, they should be able to have a beer together, right?"
"OK," I said.
Dominique Kohl looked nothing at all like the photographs I had seen of Teresa Daniel, but it was a blend of both their faces I saw in my head. I left Elizabeth Beck with her book and headed up to my original room. I felt more isolated up there. Safer. I locked myself in the bathroom and took my shoe off. Opened the heel and fired up the e-mail device. There was a message from Duffy waiting: No activity at warehouse. What are they doing?
I ignored it and hit new message and typed: We lost Teresa Daniel.
Four words, eighteen letters, three spaces. I stared at them for a long time. Put my finger on the send button. But I didn't press it. I went to backspace instead and erased the message. It disappeared from right to left. The little cursor ate it up. I figured I would send it only when I had to. When I knew for sure.
I sent: Possibility your computer is penetrated.
There was a long delay. Much longer than the usual ninety seconds. I thought she wasn't going to answer. I thought she must be ripping her wires out of the wall. But maybe she was just getting out of the shower or something because about four minutes later she came back with a simple: Why?
I sent: Talk of a hacker with partial access to government systems.
She sent: Mainframes or LANs?
I had no idea what she meant. I sent: Don't know.
She asked: Details?
I sent: Just talk. Are you keeping a log on your laptop?
She sent: Hell no!
I sent: Anywhere?
She sent: Hell no!!
I sent: Eliot?
There was another four-minute delay. Then she came back with: Don't think so.
I asked: Think or know?
She sent: Think.
I stared at the tiled wall in front of me. Breathed out. Eliot had killed Teresa Daniel. It was the only explanation. Then I breathed in. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe he hadn't. I sent: Are these e-mails vulnerable?
We had been e-mailing back and forth furiously for more than sixty hours. She had asked for news of her agent. I had asked for her agent's real name. And I had asked in a way that definitely wasn't gender-neutral. Maybe I had killed Teresa Daniel.
I held my breath until Duffy came back with: Our e-mail is encrypted. Technically might be visible as code but no way is it readable.
I breathed out and sent: Sure?
She sent: Totally.
I sent: Coded how?
She sent: NSA billion-dollar project.
That cheered me up, but only a little. Some of NSA's billion-dollar projects are in the Washington Post before they're even finished. And communications snafus screw more things up than any other reason in the world.