There wasn’t much to say. She was right, it could happen. To either of us.

She went on: “The saddest thing was the day their kids could come visit, and how happy they were to see their kids. Some of the kids didn’t even seem to remember their moms that well. And sometimes the women thought their kids might be coming and then they wouldn’t show up and they’d just sit in a corner and cry. And I thought, I don’t even have anybody who’d come to see me if I was inside.”

I said, “LuEllen, you know-”

“You couldn’t come,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you see me that way, even if you wanted to. But I was thinking, if I got caught, nobody would even know who I was. Know my name. Nobody but a couple of people I went to junior high school with. Nobody would even know.” She sat up suddenly. “My life has been okay so far. I didn’t have a lot of choices. It was this or maybe be a practical nurse like my mom, running pans of shit around a nursing home.”

“You’re too smart for that.”

“In this country, smart isn’t enough. You’ve got to be taught right, from the start. You’ve got to get that education, or have money from your parents, you just…” She flopped back on the bed. “I don’t know. But I’ve gotta find something else to do. I still get the rush, I still get high on it, when I’m inside somewhere, but I gotta get out of this before it’s too late.”

That made for a great night’s sleep. That and recurring dreams that featured an overweight man facedown in the street…

THE next day was a Saturday. We both woke early, twitched around a little, trying to get that last little patch of sleep, and I finally gave up and found the remote and clicked on the TV. The Menu screen came up with the day, date, and time. I hadn’t been paying attention, and when they registered with me, I said, “Saturday. Damnit. If nobody gets our e-mail, we won’t get any passwords back.”

“I bet political people check their e-mail every five minutes,” LuEllen said. She sat up and stretched. “Let’s get breakfast and then go see.”

While she cleaned up, I clicked around to the local channels, looking for news. I found it, but there was nothing about the shooting the night before. We went out, ate French toast-she was overly cheerful, and maybe a little embarrassed about the talk the night before, revealing herself like that-and then we got on-line at our big wi-fi building.

LuEllen was right about political people. They check their e-mail. Seventeen replies had come in to the dump site. I transferred them to Carp’s machine, then called into the first number of the DCC working group. I got the log-in screen and started running names. Darryl Finch, the sixth guy on the list, had given us Dfinch/Bluebird9 in our solicitation for the senator’s log. That didn’t work, but Dfinch/bluebird5 punched us right through.

Dfinch/bluebird5 got me into a personnel computer. Lots of details on the staffers, but no files on James Carp or Bobby. Then, browsing through a file on a Linda Soukanov, I spotted a letter that supported a complaint from a co-worker against Carp. Soukanov was with the working group. She said that she had witnessed Carp paying “unwelcome attention” to a co-worker in the next cubicle. The co-worker was identified as a Michelle Strom, with the Bobby project.

“Excellent,” I said.

“Got something?” LuEllen was bored.

“Maybe… give me a minute.”

I pulled the file on Michelle Strom and found a complaint that said that Carp had touched her in an elevator, “pressing his front against my back,” and that he’d one other time touched her breast under the pretext of looking at her identification photograph. She said she wouldn’t have reported the incidents because she wasn’t sure that he had intentionally touched her, but she’d heard reports now from other women…

I looked at my senator-log sign-up list. Nothing from Linda Soukanov, but Michelle Strom was there: Mickey/DasMaus1. God help me.

I signed out of Dfinch and tried Mickey/DasMaus1 and failed, spent five minutes going through possible combinations and got in on Mickey/Mauser. All things come to hackers who are patient.

Most things, anyway. I got into Michelle Strom’s space, and found that I could push memos or reports into the system, but nothing could be retrieved without another code. From the way the front-end was set up, I suspected the link would shut me down rather than let me experiment-and would tell the system people that somebody was trying to crack the system after getting in with Strom’s password.

“Stone wall,” I said.

I got in on four more name/password combinations, but the security was better than I’d hoped. I could get administrative stuff, but I couldn’t get any operations files. Before I shut down, I entered William Heffron into a general search engine and immediately popped a half-dozen reports from Washington TV-news websites. I pulled the first one and read to LuEllen:

“Two Virginia men were shot to death at a Meridian Park apartment building Friday night by an assailant who shot one man on the building’s stairway and another as he fled to the sidewalk outside the building, District police said Saturday.

“Terrance Small of Alexandria and William Heffron of McLean, both government employees with a Justice Department data processing center, were apparently on their way to visit a friend when they were shot. Police speculated that the men had inadvertently stumbled into a drug transaction at the Marlybone Apartments on Clay Ave.

“Police say each of the men was shot once in the head at extremely close range, execution-style, in addition to suffering wounds to the body. Neither of the men had criminal records, police said. Terry Banks, a supervisor at the Justice Department’s Division of Data Integration, said, ‘This is a terrible tragedy. These were fine men; everybody liked them. I just don’t understand how these things can happen. The people in this division will be devastated.’ ”

There was more, but that was the substance of it.

“A drug deal? The government’s not even talking to the cops when their own people get murdered,” LuEllen said. “They’re as nuts as Carp is.”

“Maybe they really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t know what Heffron and Small were doing there, that Carp has an apartment there.” I went back into the search engine, looking for Carp, and got only fish-related sites. “Nothing at all on Jimmy or James Carp.”

LuEllen shook her head, the corners of her mouth turned down. I’m a skeptic when it comes to government; she’s a couple steps further along that road than I am.

“SO now what?” LuEllen twisted around in her seat, looking out for passersby. “We’ve been here a long time.”

“If you had to get better entry equipment, instead of the Target stuff, could you get it close by?”

“In Philly,” she said. “You met the guy.”

“I thought he was just guns.” He’d once armed me for a confrontation in West Virginia. Another thing I try not to dream about.

“We can order stuff,” she said.

“He creeps me out.”

“ ’Cause he’s a creep,” she said. “But he can get the stuff and he’s trustworthy. We’re going in somewhere?”

I rubbed my face, thinking about it. “Michelle Strom is interesting,” I said. “I’d like to look around her apartment. Let me…”

I went back into the personnel computer using the Dfinch name, and pulled Strom’s file. She was single, thirty-three, with a B.A. in history and Russian, and an M.A. in Russian. She had some kind of supervisory capacity, though I couldn’t tell exactly how many people she supervised. There were two good photos of her, apparently used for her ID card. I copied down her home address, and her home, office, and cell phone numbers.

“So…”