But as DHS morphed into a larger and more unwieldy entity, assimilating twenty-two separate intelligence agencies under its umbrella, he found his enthusiasm waning. It wasn’t that DHS’s stated mission of protecting America had dimmed. Far from it. It was the way that mission was becoming increasingly compromised. This took some of the spark out of getting up in the morning, donning a cape and shield, and doing battle with the terrorists who’d so callously wiped out more than three thousand innocent American lives.

He’d ended up second in command of DHS’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate (IAIPD), which was to coordinate interagency counterterrorism efforts with members of the “Big 15,” the fifteen major agencies comprising the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)-the FBI; the CIA; the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); the State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); the intelligence agencies of the army, navy, air force, and marines; as well as lesser known, shadowy, and seldom understood intelligence agencies, such as the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA), and the intelligence community’s internal overseer, the Defense Security Service (DSS). Add to that jumble of acronyms the newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), a CIA task force of analysts with plans to integrate with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and the FBI’s counterterrorism division; plus the latest, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX)-and Lord knew how many others that had sprung up under the now wider national security umbrella (even Browning didn’t know, and he was an insider). Intelligence reports were modified for distribution to local law enforcement agencies around the country, including Washington’s police department.

This had spawned another acronym among Browning and his colleagues, spoken only in private: BON, “Bureau of Noncoordination.”

The truth was, Browning had learned that, despite all the promises, all the lofty rhetoric, and all the potential of creating a Department of Homeland Security as the first line of defense against further terrorist attacks-and despite the acknowledgment that a failure of sharing information had played a major role in the September 11 attacks-these agencies, and more, simply would not cooperate, and refused to cede turf and budgets, no matter how high the stakes for the nation and its trusting citizens.

Which was why Browning, in concert with his superior and others at DHS, had elected lately to deal directly with the British and Canadian intelligence services and not funnel such sources as Milton Crowley through the CIA and FBI. Crowley was but one of many sources whom Browning and his people had begun to deal with directly. The FBI had forged an agreement with DHS under which it was required only to provide the agency with summaries of its intelligence gathering, not the raw material. The FBI had hired two hundred new agents to do nothing but wade through hundreds of thousands of recorded phone calls and computer intercepts under the Patriot Act, using “trap-and-trace” surveillance techniques favored by the NSA. In addition, the FBI itself had begun monitoring the web-surfing habits of Internet users, resulting in thousands of “captures” that also needed to be analyzed each day.

Meanwhile, the CIA had long ago abandoned its mandate to conduct operations only outside the country, and had launched an aggressive campaign of domestic spying and eavesdropping on Americans.

This all resulted in a massive intake of information, most of it useless, but which had to be analyzed nonetheless.

Intelligence gathered by the FBI remained in the House That Hoover Built until someone got around to writing a report to send it to the Department of Homeland Security.

The CIA’s treasure trove of intercepted communications remained in Langley, its importance to national security left in the hands of those who’d obtained it.

And information that a Toronto talent agency, Melicamp-Baltsa, might be sympathetic to terrorist aims, joined thousands of other bits of information that was eventually shared with the FBI.

Joseph Browning III finished his coffee and went back inside the house to shower and dress for the day.

“Good morning,” Christine said as she came down the stairs to get her own coffee.

“Good morning,” he said, accepting a feathery kiss on the cheek.

“Heavy day lined up?” she asked.

“The usual,” he said, truthfully. It would be business as usual at DHS, and that was the problem. His frown said as much.

She disappeared into the kitchen as he started up the stairs.

“Oh, before I forget,” she said, reappearing, “Rosie and George wonder if we’d like to go to the opera with them. They have two extra tickets-friends of theirs had to cancel.”

“The opera?” he said from the landing, a smile on his face. “Chris, I appear in an opera every day I go to work.”

“It’s Tosca,” she said. “We never go to the opera. I’d love to. The tickets are for opening night.”

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s do it. I could use some original make-believe.”

“So, how’d it go?” Willie Portelain asked Sylvia Johnson.

They sat in an interrogation room at headquarters, awaiting the arrival of Carl Berry and others. Their brief assignment to the Aaron Musinski murder was over, now that Grimes had been brought in and the contents of his office had been secured, his computer in the hands of forensic technicians capable of finding things on its hard drive that long ago had been assumed to have disappeared into the ether. They were back on the Lee case, joining the newly formed task force.

“How did what go?” she asked.

“Your date last night. Who is he?”

“Willie!”

“Just curious, lady. You have a good time?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. We had dinner at Georgia Brown’s, and caught the last set at Blues Alley.”

“He pay?”

“Of course he-How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good.”

“You taking your medicine and cutting down on the calories?”

“What are you, my mother? Who’d you see at Blues Alley?”

“A young pianist, Ted Rosenthal, and his trio. He was wonderful.”

“So, tell me about this dude.”

The door opened, to Sylvia’s relief, and Berry and the other detectives joined them.

“Okay, what’ve we got?” Berry asked.

They went around the table, each detective reporting.

“We’ve talked to every student in that opera school they run out of Takoma Park,” one said.

“Not for the first time,” said another. “We compared reports of the previous interviews with them with what they had to say this time around. Nothing new.”

“What about Christopher Warren?” Berry asked.

“Yeah, we talked to him again, too. Surly bastard.” He punched Willie in the arm and laughed. “He’s the one you coldcocked, huh?”

“Ran into my arm, that’s all.”

“Yeah, right.”

Another detective said, “There’s one student who doesn’t have an alibi.”

“Warren.”

“No, besides him.” He consulted his notes. “A Korean named Lester Suyang. He was alone all night, he says, like he said in previous interviews. Nothing there. He doesn’t strike me as the murdering kind.”

“What is ‘the murdering kind’?” Berry asked.

“You know what I mean.”

“A couple of the other students say Suyang didn’t like the deceased, that they had a few shouting matches.”

“That’s new,” Berry offered. “What’s he say about it?”