The book was thick and organized alphabetically, and I noted that Cliff's handwriting was surprisingly neat, with a light touch and precisely formed and uniformly sized letters. I'm no expert in handwriting analysis, but with males such orthographic neatness is often a sign of a Catholic-based education, or a school experience dominated by bossy women who care about such things. My own handwriting has never been mistaken for having a light touch.

Bian, watching me, observed, "You know what? I've never actually seen a crime solved through an address book."

I made no response to that observation.

"It's odd," she continued. "Something like 90 percent of murders are committed by people the victim knew."

"I'm aware of the statistics."

"Good. So you would think an address book would be like a road map from the victim to the killer. In fact, often, the killer was in the victim's address book… unfortunately you don't know that until you've already ID'd the killer through other means." She concluded, "A very low percentage of crimes have been solved through address books."

"Am I wasting my time?"

"Well… I thought you should know."

"Now I know. Thank you."

"Statistics can be useful criminological tools."

I looked at her.

"Are you sensitive to criticism?" she asked.

"Me?… No. Would you like a punch in the nose?" I explained, "I'm not looking for the killer, Bian. I'm trying to see who this guy associated with, get an idea of his life."

"I see." She pointed at a name and asked me, "And what does that name tell you?"

I looked at the name Albert Tigerman. "It's a statistical fact that only.0001 percent of killers are named Albert, and less than.0001 percent of those have the surname Tigerman. Ergo, Albert moves to the bottom of our suspect pool." I smiled at her. "I love statistics."

She smiled back tightly. "Try again."

"Should I know Albert?"

"Were you a Pentagon insider… yes, you would instantly recognize the name."

"That's why I have you."

"Tigerman was Daniels's boss, a very powerful and influential man. He's the deputy to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Thomas Hirschfield-roughly the third-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon."

"Is there a point to this?"

"You catch on quick. Why don't I leaf through the address book and you look over my shoulder? I might recognize some of these people."

I tossed her the book. She started with the A's and ran her finger down the pages quickly, moving on to the B's, and down the line. Occasionally she used a pen and stabbed a checkmark or slashed an X beside a name. I had not a clue what significance was attached to those names or to these symbols.

As you might expect, the majority of names in Cliff's book were males, some with military ranks, most not. From what I could discern, Cliff's world was the usual amalgam of work colleagues, professional contacts, and people who were important or relevant to him personally; a few doctors, his dry cleaner, and presumably some friends and social acquaintances. Less than a third were women. Also, only about a third had listed addresses, the majority limited to phone numbers, predominately from area codes 202-Washington-and 703-northern Virginia.

A few names were recognizable to me, however-several well-known members of the National Security Council staff, some senior CIA officials, assorted Pentagon muckety-mucks, and General Nicholas Westfall, commander of the Defense Intelligence Agency. For a midlevel bureaucrat, Clifford was surprisingly well connected and inside the beltway loop.

Bian was now on the T's, and she flipped back to the D's and pointed to several people with the surname Daniels she had put X's next to-a Theresa with a northern Virginia area code and a South Arlington address; a Matthew with a Manhattan address; and a Marilyn in Plano, Texas.

Bian placed her right forefinger on Theresa from South Arlington. "What do you want to bet that's his ex? This address is only a few blocks from his apartment. The other two could be his parents, siblings, or maybe cousins."

At that moment Will popped his head around the corner. In a shrill and exhilarated voice, he reported, "We broke his code word. We're diddling his hard drive."

This sounded either vulgar or ridiculous, but Bian diplomatically asked Will, "And what are you finding?"

"Well… it's quite intriguing. Mr. Daniels stored a lot of personal materials on his computer. Financial information. Checkbook. He did his taxes on the computer. Lots of personal correspondence, too." He added, with fraternal approval, "He was very computer-savvy…" then added, "but it's really weird."

Will was really weird. I kept that thought to myself, however, and asked, very sweetly, "What's weird?"

"The three encrypted folders."

"Folders?"

"Yeah… folders…" He stared at me through his thick spectacles before concluding, accurately, that his interrogator was a technological dimwit. "Like a dresser drawer in the hard drive, where you store common items… say, socks or underwear. Judging by the large amount of storage space, they must contain multiple files. But as I said, they're encoded. Indecipherable."

I asked, "Are we talking socks or underwear?" Actually, I'm not that much of a dimwit-I knew what folders were-but this was my way of getting him to tone down the cyber gibberish. He stared back, I'm sure wishing he, or I, were someplace else, but I'm sure he got the point.

Bian decided to be helpful and asked Will, "Can you describe the code?"

"Well… it looks like a commercial version. The FBI and CIA tried to get Congress to ban these commercial codes, but that hasn't worked. So now there are a number of these applications out there." He looked thoughtful and added, "Mostly, though, they're employed by businesses, not individuals."

Bian and I traded glances. The obvious question was: Why would a Defense Department official suspected of espionage have a private code installed on his personal computer? Then again, the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the truth.

Will, sort of verbally rubbing his hands together, informed us, "Wow… I'd love to take a whack at those codes myself."

Being an idiot, I asked, "So why don't you?"

"Frankly, that could take months, particularly if it's a VPN version. That ISP protocol is… well, with all those symmetric ciphers…" He shook his head. "Now, if it's SSL, that would be better luck."

Bian was nodding. I had not a clue what Will was whining about, nor was I about to ask another stupid question and risk another stream of what passes for technical jargon with these people and actually is alphabet diarrhea. Bian, ever the diplomat, suggested to Will, "Thank you. But wouldn't it make better sense to bring these encrypted files to the National Security Agency? They have a lot of expertise in codes and codebreaking."

This was not what Will hoped to hear, and he made a mopey little nod.

"How long will that take?" I asked Will.

"Maybe they already have experience with this code. If they have to break it from scratch, depending on the sophistication… a day… two days… three months. How badly do you want it?"

"Yesterday sounds about right. Tell Phyllis. She'll know whose ass to kiss or kick."

"Sure." He started to walk away, then slapped his forehead and spun around. "Oh… there're some letters John thinks you should see."

Carrying our coffee, Bian and I got up and followed Will back to the office, where John had his nose pressed against the computer screen.

I said to John, "Will mentioned letters."

"Uh… yeah. I thought you should see these," John replied. "Hold on." Without looking up, he manipulated the little cursor as though it was connected to his fingertip and quickly brought a Microsoft Word file up on the screen. He said, "There are a number of these. This one's a little nastier… yet generally representative of what we're seeing."