'Well, I'll have to check with the attorney general. She hates it when I call her at home.'
'I'm on my way.'
The Engineering Research Facility was three concrete-and-glass pods surrounded by trees, and one could not get into the parking lot without stopping at a guard booth that was no more than a hundred feet from the one at the Academy's entrance. ERF was the FBI's most classified division, its employees required to scan their fingerprints into biometric locks before Plexiglas doors would let them in. Lucy was waiting for me in front. It was almost eight p.m.
'Hi,' she said.
'There are at least a dozen cars in the parking lot,' I said. 'Do people usually work this late?'
'They drift in and out at all hours. Most of the time I never see them.'
We walked through a vast space of beige carpet and walls, passing shut doors leading into laboratories where scientists and engineers worked on projects they could not discuss. I had only vague notions of what went on here beyond Lucy's work with CAIN. But I knew the mission was to technically enhance whatever job a special agent might have, whether it was surveillance, or shooting or rappelling from a helicopter, or using a robot in a raid. For Gault to have gotten inside here was the equivalent of him wandering freely through NASA or a nuclear power plant. It was unthinkable.
'Benton told me about the photograph that was in your desk,' I said to Lucy as we boarded an elevator.
She keyed us up to the second floor. 'Gault already knows what you look like, if that's what you're worried about. He's seen you before - at least twice.'
'I don't like that he might now know what you look like,' I said pointedly.
'You're assuming he has the photograph.'
We entered a gray rabbit warren of cubicles with workstations and printers and stacks of paper. CAIN himself was behind glass in an air-conditioned space filled with monitors, modems and miles of cable hidden beneath a raised floor.
'I've got to check something,' she said, scanning her fingerprint to unlock CAIN's door.
I followed her into chilled air tense with the static of invisible traffic moving at incredible speeds. Modem lights blinked red and green, and an eighteen-inch video display announced CAIN in bold bright letters that looped and whorled like the fingerprint of the person who was just scanned in.
'The photograph was in the envelope with the American Express card he apparently now has,' I said. 'Logic would tell you that he may have both.'
'Someone else could have it.' She was intensely watching the modems, then glancing at the time on her screen and making notes. 'It depends on who actually went through my desk.'
We had always assumed it was Carrie alone who had broken in and taken whatever she wanted. Now I was not so sure.
'Carrie may not have been by herself,' I said.
Lucy did not reply.
'In fact, I don't believe Gault could have resisted the opportunity to come in here. I think he was with her.'
'That's awfully risky when you're wanted for murder.'
'Lucy, it's awfully risky to break into here to begin with.'
She continued making notes while CAIN's colors swirled on the screen and lights glowed on and off. CAIN was a space-age squid with tentacles connecting law enforcement entities here and abroad, his head an upright beige box with various buttons and slots. As cold air whirred, I almost wondered if he knew what we were saying.
'What else might have disappeared from your office?' I then said. 'Is there anything else missing?'
She was studying a modem's flashing light, her face perplexed. She glanced up at me. 'It's got to be coming in through one of these modems.'
'What is?' I asked, puzzled.
She sat before a keyboard, struck the space bar and the CAIN screen saver vanished. She logged on and began typing UNIX commands that made no sense to me. Next she pulled up the System Administrator Menu and got into the audit log.
'I've been coming in here routinely and checking the traffic on the modems,' she said, scanning. 'Unless this person is physically located in this building and hardwired into the system, he's got to be dialing in by modem.'
'There's no other way,' I said.
'Well' - she took a deep breath - 'theoretically you could use a receiver to pick up keyboard input via Van Eck radiation. Some Soviet agents were doing that not so long ago.'
'But that wouldn't actually get you inside the system,' I said.
'It could get you passwords and other information that might get you in if you had the dial-in number.'
'Were those changed after the break-in?'
'Of course. I changed everything I could think of, and in fact, the dial-in numbers have been changed again since. Plus we have callback modems. You call CAIN and he calls you back to make certain you're legit.' She looked discouraged and angry.
'If you attached a virus to a program,' I said, trying to help, 'wouldn't it change the size of the file? Couldn't that be a way to find out where the virus is?'
'Yes, it would change the file size,' she said. 'But the problem is that the UNIX program used to scan files for something like that is called checksum, and it's not cryptographically secure. I'm sure who ever did this included a balancing checksum to cause the bytes in the virus program to disappear.'
'So the virus is invisible.'
She nodded, distracted, and I knew she was thinking about Carrie. Then Lucy typed a who command to see what law enforcement agencies were logged on, if any. New York was. So were Charlotte and Richmond, and Lucy pointed out their modems to me. Lights danced across the front of them as data was transmitted over telephone lines.
'We should go eat dinner,' I said gently to my niece.
She typed more commands. 'I'm not hungry now.'
'Lucy, you can't let this take over your life.'
'You're one to talk.'
She was right.
'War has been declared,' she added. 'This is war.'
'This is not Carrie,' I said of the woman who, I suspected, had been more than Lucy's friend.
'It doesn't matter who it is.' She continued typing.
But it did. Carrie Grethen did not murder people and mutilate their bodies. Temple Gault did.
'Was anything else of yours taken during the break-in?' I tried again.
She stopped what she was doing and looked at me, her eyes glinting. 'Yes, if you must know,' she said. 'I had a big manilla envelope that I didn't want to leave in my dorm rooms at UVA or here because of roommates and other people in and out. It was personal. I thought it was safer in my desk up here.'
'What was in this envelope?'
'Letters, notes, different things. Some of them were from you, including the letter with the photograph and charge card. Most were from her.' Her face colored. 'There were a few notes from Grans.'
'Letters from Carrie?' I did not understand. 'Why would she write you? Both of you were here at Quantico and you didn't know each other before last fall.'
'We sort of did,' she said, her face turning a brighter red.
'How?' I asked, baffled.
'We met through a computer bulletin board, through Prodigy over the summer. I saved all the printouts of the notes we sent.'
'Did you deliberately try to arrange it so you could be at ERF together?' I said as my disbelief grew.
'She was already in the process of getting hired by the Bureau,' Lucy answered. 'She encouraged me to try to get an internship here.'
My silence was heavy.
'Look,' she demanded. 'How could I have known?'
'I guess you couldn't have,' I said. 'But she set you up, Lucy. She wanted you here. This was planned long before she met you through Prodigy. She probably had already met Gault in that northern Virginia spy shop, then they decided she should meet you.'
She angrily stared off.
'God,'1 said with a loud sigh. 'You were lured right into it.' I stared off, almost sick. 'It's not just because of how good you are at what you do. It's also because of me.'
'Don't try to turn this into your fault. I hate it when you do that.'