But as the government's ongoing campaign continued to decimate the rebels' numbers, the individual cells were forced to congeal into more cohesive and ever more secretive units. The GIA, effectively beaten as an army, had to abandon the pitched street battles that had marked the civil war stage of the conflict, although they continued to assassinate, to bomb and to kidnap. The government, for its part, waged what began as a successful torture campaign against captured prisoners who were suspected of GIA affiliation. Increasingly marginalized, the rebels countered with an effective tool to guarantee the silence of its captured operatives. If a captive talked, his or her entire family would be killed. Not just husbands and wives and children, but fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins, to the third degree.

The most celebrated of these slaughters occurred in 1997. The government arrested a nineteen-year-old boy named Antar Rachid on suspicion of taking part in the carjacking and assassination of a minor Algiers municipal official. Three days after Rachid's arrest, government security forces raided the downtown cafe out of which Rachid had operated, in the process killing three other GIA soldiers and confiscating a large cache of automatic weapons, cash and ammunition from the hidden room in the cafe's cellar. Obviously, they broke Rachid with torture and he talked.

Here Glitsky speaks again. "How many of his relatives did they kill?"

"I was getting there." The number seems to slow down even the phlegmatic Thomas. He takes a breath, tries to sound matter-of-fact. "One hundred and sixty-three. Raids in Algiers itself and in thirteen villages over the next couple of days. Gone before they knew what hit 'em. After that," Thomas says, "captured suspects stopped talking and started dying in jail."

In 1999, Algeria finally got a new civilian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and he offered amnesty to rebels who hadn't been convicted of rape or murder or other heinous crimes. Along with about eighty-five percent of the rest of them, Monique returned to civilian life, moving back in with her father and mother, going back to work at the bank. But she'd proven herself a valuable organizer and strategist to the GIA, and they weren't ready to abandon her. It wasn't the kind of organization where you simply walked out-Rachid's experience, and many others similar to it, made that crystal clear. It was like the mob. It doesn't matter if you were arrested, or if you tried to leave on your own… you are never out.

"But by now, I'm talking 1999," Thomas continues, "things have really begun to change over there. A new faction called the GSPC splits off of the GIA, and though they're still hitting government and military targets, they swear off civilian attacks within the country. After all the killing of the past years, this has a lot of grassroots appeal. The GIA leadership doesn't see it that way, but they're losing influence and, more importantly, members. And funding. They need to do something dramatic to call the faithful to them. This is jihad now, not just revolution. The will of Allah will be done, and even if fellow Muslims are killed, it is acceptable because they all become martyrs." Thomas pauses again. "The GIA decides they are going to blow up the biggest elementary school in Algiers. Six hundred kids."

"Lord, the world." Glitsky's elbow is on his desk. His hand supports his head.

"But Monique won't help them. She can't go there. It's too much."

Glitsky snorts a note of derisive laughter. "A saint, huh?"

"In some ways, she was, actually." Thomas shifts in his chair. "But now she's got an even bigger problem. On the one hand, she hates the government and what it stands for. But on the other, she can't let the GIA go ahead with this bombing. But if she tells anybody, if she betrays her cell, she knows what happens next. Her family disappears, all of it. She's seen it happen not just to Antar Rachid and his family, but maybe half a dozen other times.

"She's got four brothers and a sister, all of them married with kids. Her mother and father, both still young enough to be working. Her mother comes from a family of five, her father's the oldest of four. She's got about forty-five cousins." Thomas comes forward, finally showing a hint of urgency. "They're all dead if she talks. There's no doubt about it. Meanwhile, she's in on the planning. If she refuses, she's with the enemy. She can't show a thing."

Glitsky, nodding, appreciates her problem. "So she comes to you guys."

"She comes to me, personally. I'm stationed over there at the time. My cover is I'm with the visa section at the embassy, but she's been underground for four years and she's figured that out. I do some banking at her branch and she approaches me one day, tells me her story.

"The only way she figures she can do it is if she appears to be killed in the raid on the planners. If I'd help her appear to die, she's got information on a major planned terrorist attack. Remember, this is pre-9/11, but the Cole had already happened, the African embassies. It might have been a trap, but the bottom line is, I believed her. And it turned out it was all true. They raided the cell and found the explosives, and the government announced that Monique Souliez was one of the rebels killed in the raid."

"And Monique became Missy D'Amiens?"

"That's right."

Glitsky sits in silence for a minute. "So why are you here now, with me?"

"I thought you needed to hear the story." "Why is that?"

"Maybe so you'll understand where she's coming from. She's a quality person. Maybe the best thing would be to leave her alone, wherever she is. More than anything else, she's a hero."

But Glitsky doesn't even begin to accept this. "More than anything else, she killed two people in my town. I can't leave her alone."

"That might not have been her."

"No? I'll entertain other suggestions if you've got them."

"It could have been GIA." Glitsky snorts. "Here? They found her here?" But Thomas keeps on with it. "It's not impossible. You know the guy they arrested at the Canadian border with explosives bound for LAX? He was GIA. They're still very much active. They're not going away."

"Maybe so," Glitsky says, "but they didn't befriend some homeless woman so they could establish phony dental records for her."

Thomas takes in the truth of that. It costs him some. But he tries another tack. "If she's exposed, they kill her family, even now."

"I would hope they wouldn't do that." The words say it all. Thomas hears them clearly. This, his personal mission, has failed. But he tries one more argument. "I'd ask you to think of what she's been through. It's so different over there. She hasn't lived in the same world as most of us do. If she did kill these two people, I know it was to save her family. Two deaths against sixty. That's the kind of choice she had to make all the time back home. It must have seemed like the only option she had." "Maybe it did," Glitsky says.

But he doesn't give him any more. After a last moment of silence, poor lovesick Scott Thomas gets up out of his chair, walks to the door, opens it and, like the spook he is, vanishes.