“I’ve been thinking about that since they took you,” I said. “I had nothing else to do but talk on the phone and wait… and I did some tarot readings that were all over the place. And I think you should go on home. Lay low. If you stay with me, you become dangerous to both of us.”

“Tell me how,” she said.

“Because I may do something that would attract some attention-not much, but some. If they see you, then they know that they’ve got the right guy. And they’ll know who I am, and then they might be able to get back to you. I mean, get all the way back to the real you.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I want Carp punished. And I want this Deep Data Correlation program stopped. I’m thinking of going to Bob-Congressman Bob. He’s in the DDC file. I’m not sure he could blow up the program, but he’s got his hand on a lot of government money. If nothing else, he might be able to starve it to death. In any case, he’d be pretty damn interested in what they’ve got on him.”

“Bad?”

“A little questionable dealing here and there. Bob did some favors that were a little too enthusiastic. They don’t have him nailed down, but you get the impression that if they pushed hard enough, they might get him.”

“So you tell Bob…”

“I tell him that I’ve dealt some code with a guy who’s involved in some big hassle with the government. That this guy knew I’d worked with Bob and asked me to pass the file on.”

“That’s pretty thin ice.”

“Yeah, but there’s no way to prove anything else happened. I’m a painter, for Christ’s sakes.”

She sighed. “I’ll get a plane out tomorrow morning.”

“That’d be good,” I said.

We were silent for a while, and then she said, “If they really dug into you about the e-mail file, they’d ask how come you got to Washington before you got the e-mail file.”

“No, they won’t. I e-mailed the file to myself a couple days ago. I sorta thought this might be coming.”

“You didn’t tell me?” One eyebrow went up.

“I figured you’d squeal like a piggy,” I said. “There was the possibility that I’d never need to do it, so why mention it and put up with all the squealing?”

“Ah, jeez,” she said. “You want another Two-X?”

LuELLEN had dumped her ID, but it hadn’t been the real LuEllen anyway. She carried a backup behind the lining of a lockable jewelry case in her luggage, along with a few credit cards, a Sam’s Club card, and a membership card to the Museum of Modern Art.

She wore her hair short as a matter of course, and carried two very good wigs as a regular part of her wardrobe. We bought her a new wallet the next day, along with a new purse and a ton of the usual crap that women carry around with them. We were at National at eleven o’clock. I kissed her good-bye in the car, then trailed her, at a little distance, into the airport. There was no trouble at all. The razor-sharp security made her take off her shoes, because they had steel shanks in the heels, but it never occurred to anyone that the pretty blonde might be wearing a wig. She looked nothing like she had in the park.

She turned on the other side of the security line and nodded at me, a quick eye-lock and a nod, and then she was gone, a small, well-dressed woman carrying a medium-sized purse, maybe somebody doing business for a nonprofit, or a congressman’s aide going home.

BEFORE leaving with LuEllen for the airport, I’d called Congressman Wayne Bob at the number he’d given me for the casino research. When he answered, I said, “This is Kidd. Congressman, I gotta see you today. This is a no-shit, honest-to-God emergency. It has to do with all this corruption stuff on TV. You need to talk to me.”

“Am I gonna be on?” he blurted.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but you could be. They’ve got a file on you, and it goes into a deal with Whit Dickens. You know a Whit Dickens?”

You could almost hear him lick his lips, and he said, “Maybe.”

I said, “I could explain better if we could get off in a corner somewhere.”

“Where?” he asked.

“How about the Hay-Adams?”

“Good. How about two forty-five? I’ll get us a cranny.”

“See you then.”

THE thing about the Hay-Adams is that politicians wander in and out of it all the time, every day, virtually every hour; and the restaurant has lots of little nooks and crannies, where you can have intense conversations without being seen or overheard. Even better, I could get to the restaurant in a couple of minutes from my room.

I got to the restaurant at 2:45 on the dot. A waiter took me back to the reserved cranny, gave me a glass of ice water and a menu, and a minute later came back to say that Bob was running ten minutes late. I ordered a Dos Equis and drank ice water and beer and read the Post until 2:55, when Bob came around the corner.

Bob was short and too heavy in a masculine, pink, southern way. He had a florid, short-nosed face and a belly, white haystack hair, and a perpetual smile. He was sweating with the summer heat when he slid into the booth across from me; he was wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit, which you’re only allowed to wear if you come from the South, and a pinkie ring with a deep blue oval stone, and he looked pretty good in all of it. He was about fifty, I thought, and his pale blue eyes were worried. Bob was kind to old people, children, and dogs, but had a reputation for striking like a rattlesnake if you pissed him off.

“What’s shakin’?” he asked. Before I could answer, he pointed a pistol finger at a waiter, and then tipped his thumb into his mouth. The waiter nodded and disappeared. “Universal signal for a Beefeater’s martini, up, with two olives and ice-cold.”

I dug into my pocket and found a printout of the documents that had been compiled against Bob. I passed it to him. He read it once, then again, more carefully, then put the paper on the table, folded it four times, into a small square, and stuck it into his pocket. “Could cause me some trouble,” he said thoughtfully. He looked me over. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Frank Krause. Your friendly neighborhood senator.”

He took a moment to think about that, and then a single wrinkle appeared in his forehead. “Frank Krause? I saw something on TV about Frank Marsh, they said something about Krause.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said.

“How are you mixed up in it?”

“There’s a guy I know only on the Internet. He’s apparently involved in some kind of hassle with Krause. Anyway, he says that Krause has got a rat’s-nest inter-agency intelligence operation going, and one of the things that they’re testing is called Deep Data Correlation. The basic concept was supposed to be that they could look at an ocean of data and figure out from that who might be bad guys. Terrorists.”

“Is that bad?” The waiter came back with a martini, waited, with me, until Bob nodded. The waiter went away and I continued.

“Not if that was what was happening. But there are some fundamental problems with that kind of data-mining,” I said. I explained the numbers problem. “So essentially, what they were trying to do is impossible. But-if you come at it from the other end, starting with a name, then going after associated data, you can develop some pretty powerful tools.”

“Wait a minute,” Bob said. “You’re saying that instead of looking at the data, and finding suspects, they find a suspect, and then mine the data to support the suspicion.”

“Yeah. Except, of course, that you’ve got to identify a target first. With terrorists, identifying the target is the whole problem. That’s the hard part. If they’d been a private company, say, hired to find techniques that would identify terrorists, they’d have concluded that data-mining was a waste of time. But they’re not in a private company. They’re with the government. So they apparently said to themselves, ‘Well, data-mining won’t work, but we’ve got this great research tool, let’s just check it out on a few targets.’ ”