I looked over to Vann to see what she thought. She nodded at me. “Dr. Baer left behind a suicide note,” I said. “He mentioned Cassandra Bell in it.”

“How? Is she behind this in some way?” Buchold asked.

“We don’t have any reason to believe so,” Vann said. “But we also have to follow up all the leads.”

“I knew this was going to happen,” Buchold said.

“What was going to happen?” I asked.

“Violence,” Buchold said. “Rick will tell you. Those dipshits passed Abrams-Kettering and I said to him that sooner or later there was going to be a mess. You don’t just take five million people sucking on the government teat and punt them into the street and expect them to go without a fight.” He looked over at me. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true, but I let it go. “How far does this set you back?”

“You mean our research?”

“Yes.”

“It sets us back by years,” Buchold said. “There’s data in the lab that wasn’t anywhere else.”

“You don’t have multiple copies of your data?” Vann asked.

“Of course we do,” Buchold said.

“And you can’t pull it down off your networks?”

“You don’t understand,” Buchold said. “We don’t ever put anything genuinely sensitive online. The moment we do that the hacking begins. We’ll put up dummy servers with nothing on them but encrypted pictures of cats, for fuck’s sake, and we won’t tell anyone we’ve put them out there. Within four hours we’ve got hackers from China and Syria cracking them open. We’d be idiots to put actual confidential data into an outside-accessible server.”

“So all your data was stored locally,” I said.

“Stored locally,” Buchold said. “Stored multiply on internal servers.”

“What about archives?” Vann asked. “Data stored off-network.”

“We did that, of course. And stored it in a secure room on campus.”

“So all of it—local and archived data—went up with the lab building.” Vann glanced over to me with an expression that I suspect meant these people were sloppy.

“Right,” Buchold said. “It’s possible we can piece together some recent data from e-mails and the computers in the office building. If they weren’t destroyed by either the blast or by the fire-suppression system. But realistically speaking—years of research. Gone. Dead. Destroyed.”

*   *   *

“Oh, look, it’s midnight,” I said, to Vann, as she drove me home. “My first real day on the job is over.”

Vann smiled at this, the cigarette in her mouth bouncing as she did so. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “It’s been a little more hectic than most first days.”

“I can hardly wait for tomorrow,” I said.

“I doubt that.” Vann drooled smoke out of her lips.

“You know that shit’s going to kill you, right?” I asked. “The smoking. There’s a reason why no one does it anymore.”

“There’s a reason why I do it,” she said.

“Yeah? What is it?”

“Let’s say we keep some mystery in our relationship,” Vann said.

“Whatever,” I said, with what I hoped was just the right amount of casual flip. Vann smiled again. Score one for me.

My phone went off. It was Tony. “Shit,” I said.

“What?”

“I was supposed to meet with my maybe new roommates tonight,” I said.

“Do you want me to write you a note?” Vann asked.

“Cute,” I said. “Hold on.” I opened the channel and spoke with my inside voice. “Hey, Tony.”

“So we were all hoping that you might pop by tonight,” Tony said.

“Yeah, about that,” I began.

“But then I saw that Loudoun Pharma exploded and they think it might be a terrorist plot or something, and I thought to myself, I’m guessing Chris might be a little busy this evening.”

“Thank you for understanding,” I said.

“Looks like you had an exciting day.”

“You have no idea.”

“Well, then, let me end it with a bit of good news,” Tony said. “The group tried you in absentia and found you guilty of being a probably worthy flatmate. You are hereby sentenced to the nicest room in the brownstone. May God have mercy on your soul.”

“That’s great, Tony,” I said. “No, really. I appreciate it.”

“That’s good to hear. And the rest of us appreciate you paying rent so that we’re not thrown out in the street, so we’re even. I’m sending your house code now. Once you’re here change it so no one but you knows it. I got your first and last and security deposit, so you’re good to go. Show up anytime.”

“Probably tomorrow,” I said. “I’m already close to my parents’ place. I’m going to crash here for the night.”

“Sounds good,” Tony said. “Now get some rest. You sound beat. Good night.”

“Night,” I said, and then switched back to my outside voice. “I got the apartment.”

“That’s nice,” Vann said.

“It’s actually a room in an intentional community,” I said.

“Funny, you don’t look like a hippie.”

“I’ll work on it,” I promised.

“Please don’t,” she said.

Chapter Nine

THE NEXT MORNING every road in D.C. was jammed from 5:30 A.M. onward. More than a hundred Haden long-range truckers got onto the interstate loop around the city and arranged their trucks in geometrical patterns designed to induce maximum disruption to automatic driving systems, and drove at twenty-five miles an hour. Commuters, frustrated with the loop being more locked up than usual, switched over to manual and tried to get around the blockages, which of course only made things worse. By seven o’clock the loop was at a complete standstill.

And then, for extra added fun, Haden truckers locked up Interstate 66 and the toll road into Virginia.

“Late on the third day of your job,” Vann said to me, from her desk, as I got into the office. She pointed to the desk next to hers as she did it, indicating that it was my desk now.

“Everyone’s late today,” I said. “I should be graded on that curve.”

“How did you manage to get in from Potomac Falls, anyway?” Vann asked. “Tell me you borrowed your dad’s helicopter. That would be kind of amazing.”

“As it happens, Dad does have a helicopter,” I said. “Or his company does. But it’s not allowed to land in our neighborhood. So, no. I got dropped off at the Sterling stop of the Metro and took the train in.”

“And how was that.”

“Unpleasant,” I said. “It was super crowded and I got a lot of nasty looks. Like it was my fault the roads were crushed. I almost said, look, people, if it were my fault, I wouldn’t be on the goddamn train with the rest of you, now would I.”

“It’s going to be a long week with this shit,” Vann said.

“It’s not an effective protest if it’s not pissing people off.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t effective,” Vann said. “I didn’t even say I wasn’t sympathetic. It just means it’s going to be a long week. Now, come on. Forensics has got news for us.”

“What news?” I asked.

“On our dead guy,” Vann said. “We know who he is. And apparently there’s something else, too.”

*   *   *

“First off,” Ramon Diaz said, “meet John Sani, your no-longer-mystery man.”

We were back in the imaging suite, looking at a highly detailed, larger-than-life image of Sani on the morgue slab. It was cleaner and less annoying to the medical examiners to have field agents look at their handiwork this way. The model Diaz was projecting could be manipulated to examine any part of the body that the examiners scanned or opened. At this point the body did not look as if it had been cut into any more than it already had been at the neck. This was the “cover” scan.

“So the Navajo came through for us,” Vann said.

“They did,” Diaz said. “Looks like they sent his information to us around midnight their time last night.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“As far as the information we have tells us, he’s not anyone,” Diaz said. “The Navajo Nation have him on file for a single drunk and disorderly when he was nineteen. No time, community service. Other than that what we’ve got is his birth certificate and Social Security, a few medical records, and his high school transcripts, which run through tenth grade.”