Blowing a stream of smoke at the windshield, he squinted at his watch. 1:12… 1:08… 1:04

The woman continued to paw through her purse.

He wanted to kill her. He wanted to scream. He wanted to kill her and scream.

Not Bo. He looked from Wilson to the woman, and back again. Said something to the other guy in Arabic. And laughed.

A moment later, so did the woman. She threw back her head with an exclamation they couldn’t hear, and pulled a wedge of plastic from her purse. Voilà! The bored attendant swiped the card through the long slot in his credit-card machine and waited for the receipt to print. It only took about thirty seconds, but every one of them seemed like a long, torturous minute. Finally, the woman grabbed the chit and sped off, wiggling her fingers out the window. Toodle ooh.

Thirty seconds later, Wilson and his friends were behind her on the Dulles Toll Road, heading into Washington. Bo was so loose he was practically whistling, but Wilson was hardwired to the watch on his wrist – as if he was the one who was going to blow. 0:04… 03… 02… The hair on his arms was standing on end, and the muscles in his back began to spasm.

Bo threw him a glance, then looked away, eyes on the road. Wilson’s heart was crashing against his chest when the watch beeped and, out of nowhere, Bo lunged at him with a shout: “BAMMM!”

The guy in the backseat chuckled.

It was things like this that worried Ray Kovalenko. Not the scimitar-rattling on al-Jazeera or the nonstop threats on Al Faroq. It was the stuff he couldn’t explain. Like the tall guy with the sling and the suitcases.

The FBI agent sat in the darkened room, nibbling on one of the stems of his sunglasses. At the far end of the conference table, a black-and-white video played in silence on a nineteen-inch Provideo monitor. A time-and-date stamp glowed at the bottom of the screen:

12-18-04 17:51

The resolution was decent, Kovalenko thought, but the contrast was lousy. A slurry of grays, and not much more. You’d think TSA could do better than that.

The tape had been made at Dulles. A passenger agent for British Airways noticed a pair of suitcases sitting in front of the ticket counter “for half an hour, maybe more,” and called Transportation Security. When no one claimed the bags, TSA cordoned off the area and alerted the airport police. A Special Response Team was dispatched, and the terminal evacuated.

The “first responders” (that’s what they were, and that’s how they thought of themselves) were leery of the situation and wanted an EOD unit sent out, so the suitcases could be destroyed in situ. Wiser heads prevailed.

A skycap remembered wheeling the luggage up to the counter. “Guy had his arm in a sling, so I put the bags up front. No big thing. We do it all the time.”

The rep from 2-TIC – the Terrorist Threat Integration Center – coughed, then coughed again. Kovalenko glanced at her, his brow curdling into a frown.

Andrea Cabot was something of a legend, a bright and attractive CIA officer who might, or might not, have been forty. It was said that she had “her own money” – and lots of it. Having grown up in Morocco (her father ran the Port Authority in Casablanca), she liked to joke that English was her “third language.” French and Arabic were the first two, Chinese the fourth.

Now, she wore a dark suit and a string of pearls, three-inch heels, and contact lenses that were unnaturally blue – a pure indigo color that you saw only at Disney World. Like Kovalenko, she was on her way to somewhere else. In her case, to Kuala Lumpur – “KL” to the cognoscenti – where she was soon to be chief of station.

Interesting woman, Kovalenko thought. And not shy. Someone said she’d once sung the “Star-Spangled Banner” in front of forty thousand people at a soccer match at RFK Stadium. So she had guts. Too many, perhaps. One of the guys he played poker with, a counterintelligence drone at the Agency, said she’d gotten her tit in a wringer over a rendition she’d set up in eastern Turkey. The snatch went off without a hitch. They slammed the subject into the back of a refrigeration van and drove him three hundred miles to a plane that was waiting to take him to Gitmo. Imagine everyone’s surprise when they opened the door and the raghead fell out, dead. Some kind of air-handling problem.

There were a couple of stories like that – or not stories, really. More like innuendos. A bird colonel who’d worked with her in Turkey frowned when Kovalenko asked about her. But all he said was, “Interesting woman…” What do you mean? Kovalenko asked. “Well,” the colonel said, looking uncomfortable, “she can be pretty aggressive in an interrogation setting. Not that that’s necessarily bad,” he hastened to add. “It’s just… kind of surprising when you see it.”

None of this bothered Kovalenko. As far as he was concerned, Andrea Cabot was just about perfect. Her only drawback – the only reason he didn’t give her a tumble, really – was the Mandarin Chinese thing. That’s what worried him. That’s why he frowned. Because if Andrea spoke Chinese, she was probably speaking to Chinese. So while the cough could be anything, a cold or the flu, it might also be something else. Something Chinese. Like SARS or the bird flu.

As Kovalenko turned this thought over in his mind, he saw Andrea lean toward the monitor and squint. “Freeze that,” she whispered.

Kovalenko did. In the picture, a man stood near the end of a serpentine line in front of the British Airways counter. He wore a long dark overcoat, and a hat. You could almost make out his face.

“That’s the guy?” Andrea asked.

Kovalenko grunted. The man in the frame had his arm in a sling, as if it were broken. And maybe it was. But Kovalenko didn’t think so. The sling was probably just a ploy, a way of getting his bags up to the counter without having to carry them, without having to stand with them. It was the kind of thing Ted Bundy did before they put him to sleep.

“Okay,” Andrea said. The monitor sprung back to life. Another cough.

That’s all I need, Kovalenko thought. To drown in my own sputum.

He’d been running on empty ever since 9/11, hopscotching from Washington to Hamburg, Hamburg to Dubai. Dubai to Manila. Djakarta, Islamabad. Except for Hamburg, it was one shithole after another. By now, his resistance was nil, his circadian rhythms so out of whack, his body felt like a Pharoah Sanders solo. And this building, squirreled away in the Navy Yard, was a big part of the problem.

“A secure facility,” its windows had been bricked up since the early seventies, when the NRO had taken it over to study satellite imagery. It was, literally, a place “where the sun don’t shine.” Sometimes, it seemed as if everyone who worked there was sick or coming down with something. Like me, Kovalenko thought. I’ve been coming down with something for a long, long time.

On the monitor, the man with the sling spoke to someone in the line ahead of him.

“Who’s that girl?” Andrea asked, peering at the monitor. “Do we know who she is?”

A laconic voice with a British accent drifted down the table in the darkness. “Nohhhhhh.” The way he said it, the word seemed to go on and on. “I’m afraid we don’t.”

“Why not?” Kovalenko asked. “It’s your plane. You’ve got a flight manifest. How hard can it be?”

The Brit sucked in a lungful of positive ions, and sighed. A spook named Freddie, he was one of the liaisons from MI-6. “Well, it can be very difficult, indeed!” he said, leaning forward. “There were a hundred and thirty-one females aboard that flight, and they were listed by name. Not by age, weight, or position in line. We don’t have the manpower to track them all down,” Freddie insisted. “Especially when nothing has actually happened.” He looked at Kovalenko. “Perhaps when you get to London-”