She nodded. “What’s the point of origin of the cell phones?”

Lotz turned to his computer screen. “It looks like al-Zaydun’s is out of a cell tower in Peshawar. Abu Lais’s call came out of Kahuta.”

“That’s not good,” she said, and they stared at each other. Ernie’s look was bleak, but she felt a growing thrill: shameful, of course, but there it was. Kahuta is the Los Alamos, the Oak Ridge, of Pakistan, where they refine fissionables and manufacture the weapons.

There was something about a secret like this, Cynthia thought, looking into Ernie’s face, that was like nothing else, almost an intimacy: they were probably the only two people in the country right now who knew about this. Ultimately, only a few people would ever know about it, but just now, for these few moments, it was theirs alone-or, rather, they shared it with a few violent men in Pakistan, whose voices she had just heard. Another intimacy, between the hunters and the hunted. And she was the hunter here, the girl with the languages.

The two of them sighed in unison and smiled, like they had just shared a kiss. Lotz said, “I guess it’s time to hit the red button.”

This meant bringing in Lloyd Morgan, the head of N and their boss. He had made his reputation in signals intelligence, tracking Soviet missile launches, although he had seen earlier than most of his peers that NSA had to change: unwrapping Russian ciphers and tracking their missiles was not going to be as important as formerly, there was a future in electronic eavesdropping on terrorist cell phones, and to do that successfully you needed linguists. He had pulled in Cynthia straight out of her initial orientation and brought her into N Section when it was formed.

Cynthia called him, asked for an urgent meeting. The name Abu Lais cleared all previous appointments. They went to Morgan’s office immediately.

Morgan had enough status to rate a TV set in his office, and it played continually. Just now it was running CNN silently, a grim-faced anchor talking to a correspondent on a dusty tan street, the logo on the upper right of the screen showing the subject: the kidnapping of billionaire William Craig and others by Islamic terrorists, now in its second day.

Cynthia launched into her report without polite preliminaries. She described the situation for him, played the message on his computer speakers, translated it line by line as it played.

Morgan listened without comment. He was a good-sized fleshy man, pleasantly ugly, with dark-red straight hair combed back from a large pale freckled face. Colorless eyes. In anger, red bars appeared on his cheeks and the eyes turned to lead slugs, merciless. She liked that about him, in the way that attractive women of a certain stripe like men who are impressed by power rather than beauty. Cynthia had gone through enough of the other kind.

She’d gone through Morgan too. He’d put a heavy make on her from her first day in the office, nothing annoying or actionable, just a slow intense burn. Two months after she started working for him he’d taken her along to San Diego for an academic conference funded by NSA. It was about advances in natural language filtering, and neither of them really needed to be there. And the usual: they drank deeply, they told stories about their lives, and a good-night clinch in the elevator led naturally enough to his bed.

It hadn’t developed into a passionate affair, neither of the parties being that kind of person, but after San Diego she was the one he took along on junkets and to important meetings, so her name would circulate at the higher levels. She had not failed to notice that many men at these high-level conferences had attractive female assistants. Out of town, sex was on the menu, but they never engaged in anything around the office, no assignations at local hotels, all very discreet in the tradition of the inhabitants of the secret world. Cynthia regarded the liaison as a reasonable career move and a useful relief of workplace tension, one of the things a good-looking young woman did to get ahead, like earning a first-class graduate degree. She had no idea how Morgan felt, nor did she particularly care. He was married, with a couple of grown kids, well settled; she thought he rather appreciated her indifference.

After she finished, he thought for a full minute in silence. A deliberate man, Morgan; she’d never quite decided whether it was because he was extremely smart, and was calculating chess moves off into the distant future, or because he was playing outside his league and had to compensate. Morgan was another of the closely guarded secrets of the NSA.

At last he spoke. “What do you make of this, Cynthia? I mean, just from the languages.” He had a deep baritone voice, the kind they use in commercials to convey reliability.

“Well, both of them are speaking Modern Standard Arabic,” she replied, “indicating that they’re not from the same Arabic-language area or they’d be talking in one of the colloquial forms. We know al-Zaydun’s home dialect is Eastern Saudi, and it shows here in the substitution, in a couple of words, of the g sound for the q and a few other details. The other man isn’t a native Arabic speaker at all. He messes up the ’ayn, gayn, and ha’ sounds, like almost all non-native speakers do.”

“But not you.” A smile here.

“No.” No smile.

“What’s his native language, do you think?”

Cynthia had spent thousands of hours listening to recordings of dozens of Arabic dialects, and of native speakers of several score other languages speaking Arabic. “It’s hard to say exactly. I’m inclined to think a South Asian language. Dari or Pashto. Maybe Panjabi. Maybe Farsi. But Abu Lais is supposed to be Pashtun, so that fits. I could tell more with a longer colloquy.”

“Yes, and it would be nice to have their cell-phone bills with the address printed on them.” He turned to Lotz. “What does the voiceprint say about the recipient subject?”

“The voiceprint?”

“Yes. We have a recording of al-Zaydun’s voice. Is it the same?”

“I haven’t… I mean, we thought we should come to you…”

“Go do it.”

“Now?”

“No, next Easter. Go! No, wait! Lotz, this catch stays with us three alone until further notice, understand? I mean no one else.” Lotz said he got that, and Morgan made a shooing motion.

When the door had closed on Lotz, Morgan leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head, and grinned. “Well, finally!”

“You think it’s genuine?”

“Fuck, yes! We have the right guys-I fully expect the voiceprints to check out-and the right place, and what the hell else could it be? They’re not shipping bananas.” He gave her an inquiring look. “Why, don’t you?”

“Not just yet. As a matter of fact, I’ve been waiting for them to try something like this. I mean, don’t you think it’s a little funny that the most elusive al-Q operative on earth, who as far as we know hasn’t used a cell phone in years, should call a senior al-Q leader on a compromised device, which leader immediately identifies him by name?”

“People make mistakes,” he said. “The history of intelligence is full of boners.”

“Yes, Lloyd, we both know the history of intelligence,” she replied. “But I’m more concerned with recent history. This country is involved in two wars right now, and both of them are the result of massive systemic intelligence failures: we missed 9/11, and that’s the war in Afghanistan, and we screwed up on WMD, and that’s Iraq.”

“I’d hardly call Iraq an intelligence failure. There was no evidence of WMD because there weren’t any weapons.”

“No, but our intel on the Iraqis was so piss-poor that any bunch of bozos could make a temporarily plausible case for an invasion. Now we’re making noises at Iran. So I ask you, who would benefit from a stolen-nuclear-weapons scare in Pakistan? Who would love to see us involved in yet another attack on a Muslim country?”