"Be patient," he said, and he looked sad, or maybe he was just weary. "Look, Kay, I've got to go home. First thing in the morning we've got to do a surveillance by air with Marcia Gradecki and Senator Lord."

Gradecki was the United States attorney general, and Frank Lord was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an old friend.

"I'd like you along since overall you seem to know more of what's been going on than anyone else. Maybe you can explain to them the importance of the bible these wackos believe. That they'll kill for it. They'll die for it."

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "And we need to talk about how we're going to-God forbid-handle the contaminated dead should these goddamn assholes decide to blow up the reactors." He looked at me again. "All we can do is try," he said, and I knew he referred to more than the present crisis.

"That's what I'm doing, Benton," I said, and I walked back inside my suite.

I called the switchboard and asked them to ring Lucy's room, and when there was no answer, I knew what that meant. She was at ERF, and I could not call there because I did not know where in that building the size of a football field she might be. So I put on my coat and walked out of Jefferson because I could not steep until I saw my niece.

ERF had its own guard gate not far from the one at the entrance of the Academy, and most of the FBI police, by now, knew me pretty well. The guard on duty looked surprised when I appeared, and he walked outside to see what I wanted.

"I think my niece is working late," I began to explain.

"Yes, ma'am. I did see her go in earlier."

"is there any way you can contact her?"

"Hmmm." He frowned. "Might you have any idea what area she'd likely be in?"

"Maybe the computer room."

He tried that to no avail, then looked at me. "This is important."

"Yes, it is," I said with gratitude.

He raised his radio to his mouth.

"Unit forty-two to base," he said.

"Forty-two, come in."

"You ten-twenty-five me at ERF gate?"

"Ten-four."

We waited for the guard to arrive, and he occupied the booth while his partner let me inside the building. For a while we roamed long empty hallways, trying locked doors that led into machine shops and laboratories where my niece might be. After about fifteen minutes of this, we got lucky. He tried a door and it opened onto an expansive room that was a Santa's workshop of scientific activity.

Central to this was Lucy, who was wearing a data glove and head-mounted display connected to long thick black cables snaking over the floor.

"Will you be okay?" the guard asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Thank you so much."

Co-workers in lab coats and coveralls were busy with computers, interface devices and large video screens, and they all saw me walk in. But Lucy was blind. She really was not in this room but the one in the small CRTs covering her eyes as she conducted a virtual-reality walk through along a catwalk in what I suspected was the Old Point nuclear power plant.

"I'm going to zoom in now," she was saying as she pressed a button on top of the glove.

The area on the video screen suddenly got bigger as the figure that was Lucy stopped at steep grated stairs.

"Shit, I'm zooming out," she said impatiently. "No way this is going to work."

"I promise it can," said a young man monitoring a big black box. "But it's tricky."

She paused and made some other adjustment. "I don't know, Jim, is this really high-res data or is the problem me?"

"I think the problem's you."

"Maybe I'm getting cyber sick," my niece then said as she moved around inside what looked like conveyor belts and huge turbines that I could see on the video screen.

"I'll take a look at-the algorithm."

"You know," she said, making her way down virtual stairs, "maybe we should just put it in C code and go from a delay of three-four to three hundred and four microseconds, et cetera, instead of whatever's in the software we got."

"Yeah. The transfer sequences are off," said someone else. "We got to adjust the timing loops."

"What we don't have is the luxury of massaging this too much," another opinion sounded. "And Lucy, your aunt's here."

She briefly paused, then went on as if she had not heard what the person just said. "Look, I'll do the C code before morning. We gotta be sharp or Toto's going to end up stuck or failing down stairs. And then we're totally screwed."

Toto, I could only conclude, was the odd bubble head with one video eye that was mounted on a boxy steel body no more than three feet high. Legs were cleated tracks, arms had grippers, and in general he reminded me of a small animated tank. Toto was parked to one side, not far from his master, who was taking off her helmet.

"We got to change the bio-controllers on this glove," she said as she began carefully pulling it off. "I'm used to one finger meaning forward and two meaning back. Not the other way around. I can't afford a mix-up like that when we're in the field."

"That's an easy one," said Jim, and he went to her and took the glove.

Lucy looked keyed up to the point of being crazed when she met me near the door.

"How'd you get in?" She wasn't the least bit friendly.

"One of the guards."

"Good thing they know you."

"Benton told me they'd brought you back, that HRT needs you," I said.

She watched her colleagues continue to work. "Most of the guys are already there."

"At Old Point," I said.

"We've got divers around the area, snipers set up nearby, choppers waiting. But nothing's going to do any good unless we can get at least one person in."

"And obviously, that's not you," I said, knowing that if she claimed otherwise I would kill the FBI, the entire Bureau, all of them at once.

"In a way it's me going in," my niece said. "I'll be the one working Toto. Hey, Jim," she called out. "While you're at it, let's add a fly command to the pad."

"So Toto's gonna have wings," someone cracked.

Good thing. We're gonna need a smart guardian angel."

"Lucy, do you have any idea how dangerous these people are?" I could not help but say.

She looked at me and sighed. "I mean, what do you think, Aunt Kay? Do you think I'm just a kid playing with Tinkertoys?"

"I think that I can't help but feel very worried."

"We should all be worried right now," she said, drained.

"Look, I got to get back to work." She glanced at her watch and blew out a big breath. "You want a quick overview of my plan so you at least know what's going on?"

"Please."

"It starts with this." She sat on the floor and I got down beside her, our backs against the wall. "Normally, a robot like Toto would be controlled by radio, which would never work inside a facility with so much concrete and steel. So I've come up with what I think is a better way. Basically, he'll carry a spool of fiber optic cable that he'll leave behind like a snail's trail as he moves around."

"And where is he going to move around?" I asked. "Inside the power plant?"

"We're trying to determine that now," she said. "But a lot will depend on what happens. We could be covert, such as in information gathering. Or we could end up with an overt deployment on our hands, such as if the terrorists want a hostage phone, which we're banking on. Toto has to be ready to go anywhere instantly."

"Except stairs."

"He can do stairs. Some better than others."

"The fiber optics cable will be your eyes?" I said.

"It will hook right into my data gloves." She held up both hands. "And I will move as if it's me going in instead of Toto. Virtual reality will allow me to have a remote presence so I can react instantly to whatever his sensors pick up. And by the way, most of them are in that lovely shade of gray we made him," She pointed to her friend across the room. "His smart paint helps him not to bump into things," she added as if she might have feelings for him.