Cynthia was shaking her head during the last of this. “No. I was at the meeting. I know Morgan and I know Anspach. Morgan absolutely thinks it’s genuine and so did everyone at that meeting, with the possible exception of the DDO of the CIA. That bunch of people are as secret as it gets in this country, so if a scam is in progress it has to be a small cabal. In fact, I would’ve thought it was nothing but an al-Q provocation if I hadn’t overheard that business about Ringmaster.”

“So what’s your theory of the plot? Say there’s no real theft. So our guys go in there, shoot up the place, and draw a blank. It’s another Iraq, and no one is going to fall for that again. I mean, we’re stupid, but not that stupid.”

“But that’s just the point, Borden! They can’t have a fiasco. They have to find something, and that has to be what Ringmaster is about. Look, I’ll tell you how I’d do it. First, you set up an agent, someone with the skills to infiltrate a mujahideen group. The conventional wisdom is that it can’t be done, but that can’t be right or else Muslim drifters from all over the world wouldn’t be fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Christ, that gormless kid John Walker Lindh walked right into al-Qaeda a few weeks after 9/11 and no one said boo! So they set up a organization around this agent, who has all kinds of credentials that he can get hold of nuclear material. That shouldn’t be hard to fake. And these guys are waiting in some village for the delivery; they’re going to make a nuke or at minimum a dirty bomb. The inside agent leaks the location. Meanwhile, our cabal produces this scam, phony phone calls and so on, and the government panics and sends in a strike team, and of course they have to have a special unit to handle the nuclear material, and these are guys that none of the Deltas or whoever have ever seen before and they’re carrying ‘special equipment’ in sealed crates.”

She made quotation marks with her fingers as she said special equipment.

“They go to this village and blow up everyone, and lo and behold the special team finds nuclear material, which of course they’ve brought along with them in the sealed crates. Another triumph for the free world.”

“But the Pakistanis will say they haven’t lost any nuclear material.”

“Oh, please! What would anyone expect them to say? Who on earth would believe the Pakistanis when we’re showing off containers full of plutonium? And the beauty part is how covert the whole thing is. DOD, NSA, and the White House have full deniability. The president can get up there and announce with a straight face that we’ve averted a nuclear catastrophe and, by the way, the world has got to do something about Pakistan. Two days later the Indian army mobilizes on the border and U.S. missiles are retargeted.”

Now Borden was shaking his head. “That’s pretty rich, Lam. I mean, it’s one thing to speculate outside, in the lefty press, about evil cabals, but we’re in the belly of the beast. Did anyone ever ask you to join an evil cabal? Me neither. Something like this would leak like crazy; there’d be water on the floor.”

“Then how do you explain what I’ve learned?”

He thought about that for a long minute. She studied his face, willing him to roll, willing him to see what she saw so clearly. At last he sighed and said, “Let’s say I go with it. What specifically did you want me to do?”

“Use your AMICUS connections to trace any references to Ringmaster or SHOWBOAT in the CIA databases.”

“What? That’s… for God’s sake, Lam, that’s completely out of the question. I told you before, there is no AMICUS. It’s a fucking committee! It’s all bullshit coordination to make sure the different intel agencies aren’t duplicating or stepping on one another’s jockstraps. No one is going to let me wander through the CIA database, and even if they did, what should I look for? Do you think a search for rogue operations is going to yield many hits?”

“I didn’t mean asking for permission. You’ve been telling me for a long time that a smart-enough computer guy on the inside could find out anything that anyone in the government ever put on a computer.”

“You want me to hack the CIA?”

“Yes.”

“Get out of here.”

“You’re saying it can’t be done?”

“Of course it can be done, in principle. I’m over there for AMICUS meetings all the time, and they write their passwords on Post-its and stick them on their desks just like we do. I know the data architecture. And it’s the government. Any operation spends money, and even a black budget has bud get codes for different operations. But, frankly, I don’t see any upside for me in this.”

She stared at him until he dropped his eyes. He said, “What?”

“What? You know, I always thought you had your problems, but I also thought you were a real person, not the night troll everyone else thought you were. So you cleaned up your act and got a haircut? Terrific. But when I ask you to do something that might prevent the deaths of thousands of people, including your own people, you ask me if there’s some personal advantage? I’m putting my whole life on the line here, and you want to know what’s in it for you? Well, fuck your upside and fuck you, troll!”

She turned and headed out of his office, quickly, but not so quickly that she missed the response she expected.

“No, wait!”

She faced him. “What?”

“I’ll look into it. I’m over at the Agency for a meeting early tomorrow. I’ll see if I can get a line into their budget system.”

She waited a few beats and then strode over, slid easily onto his broad lap, and kissed him firmly on the mouth, a kiss just the tiniest bit south of platonic.

“Thank you, Borden. That was a very un-troll-like decision.” She could see the sweat bubble up on his forehead.

“My pleasure, so to speak. I hope they give us adjoining cells in Guantánamo.”

“It won’t come to that,” she said lightly, “you’re smarter than all of them. I just want to find out what SHOWBOAT is, so I can make the case with Morgan. We’re not selling secrets to the bad guys. Besides, the whole point is to share intel across the government. We’ll be heroes if we stop this and no one will bother about the details of access protocol.”

Borden did not respond to this; he just stared at her with the same concentration he paid to lines of code on his screen.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Tell me, Lam, do you ever have any fun?”

“What do you mean, fun?”

“Oh, you know, like people do in movies or TV commercials. Happy family parties made better with adult diapers, and couples running through fields of flowers in slo-mo. Or clubbing. You know, sweaty dancing with colored lights. Do you ever do any of that?”

“I’m a grown-up, Borden. I don’t go clubbing and my happy family consists of one unhappy person. But I’ll tell you what: if this thing comes off, I will personally find a field of flowers and run through it with you, in slo-mo.”

“I’d like that,” he said, and turned to his screens as she left.

Cynthia walked back to her office thinking that it had gone rather well. She had been manipulating men with an adroit combination of sexuality and anger for many years; she knew she was good at it, and in this instance she hardly considered it manipulation. It was as natural as breathing. She had great hopes for Borden and his skills.

Some time with the headphones, then, where she found some interesting leads unrelated to the present scam, after which she composed the necessary reports and shipped them out via NSA’s secure intranet. She checked her e-mail. That was odd: not a single message today from anyone in NSA. A slow day? It happened from time to time.

Feeling pretty pleased with herself after rolling Borden, she decided to go out for lunch. Cynthia did this several times a week and almost always at the same place, a Vietnamese restaurant located in a strip mall in Laurel, Mary land, a six-minute hop from the NSA parking lot. She took Fort Meade Road to Mary land 198, once a major north-south route along the eastern seaboard but now a continuous strip development of cheap restaurants, hot-sheet motels, used car lots, and marginal businesses selling things like secondhand batteries, videotapes, and truck parts. There was one point of historical interest on the way, however, an ugly tan eighty-unit lodging house with a mustard-colored sign out front, announcing it as the Valencia Motel. Here, during the summer of 2001, five men had stayed in room 343 and planned how to fly four passenger jet planes into American buildings. The events of 9/11, the single most devastating breach of America’s national security, had been or ga nized virtually in the shadow of the agency called National Security, and all its exquisitely sensitive instruments and magnificent computers had been powerless to stop it.