They had everything-she wasn’t sure how they had it all, but they did-everything she’d said into a pay phone, cell phone, home phone, some things she’d said aloud to herself at home, the text from each of the e-mails she’d let fly to Senator Kircher from Kinko’s and Morpheus. They knew about her relationship with Eddie Rothgeb, they had transcripts of every conversation she’d had with the mysterious W. Cooper, and they had meticulous documentation of her precise whereabouts within the confines of the headquarters building, pretty much minute by minute.

What Laramie decided to do was admit to divulging classified intelligence to Eddie Rothgeb and W. Cooper; she chose not to go belly-up on the Kircher e-mails. She’d devised this strategy on the walk over to the IIU wing from her cubicle, and stuck to it for the duration of the session. She found she had some ground to stand on, since she’d never put her name on anything, had never sent or received anything relating to the senator from home, or the office, or anywhere tied to her real name; she’d been careful with her language in the summary she’d sent, steering clear of names, departments, and specific intel and analysis that could be directly tied to her. She didn’t actually see how it really made any difference that she refused to own up to the cyber communiqués with a U.S. senator who supposedly oversaw the government’s intelligence operations, but stonewalling the interrogators at least gave her something to focus on during the caffeine-deprivation marathon. She also guessed that anybody inside or outside CIA contemplating bringing criminal charges against her would see the Kircher leak as the most egregious of the offenses she’d committed over the past three weeks of her life, and any physical evidence they’d have linking her to Kircher would be dicey at best. She’d passed the lie detector tests with flying colors.

While she chose not to own up to the Kircher notes, she found, oddly enough, that the line of questioning pursued by the roster of interrogators focused almost solely on her correspondence with W. Cooper. Between bolts of pain from the caffeine headache, she found this emphasis disturbing, presuming Cooper was in fact who he purported to be. She had a pretty good hunch he wasn’t anything or anybody different than he claimed, and at least until recently she’d done all right sticking by her instincts. Cooper himself had pegged her as a human lie detector machine. Why, then, the fourth degree on her phone calls with an Agency operative?

At 11 P.M. the day after they’d come for her, the last interrogator in the succession of faces told her she was free to go. She was made to sign a document agreeing to the fact that her employment status had officially been categorized as “suspended without pay pending internal investigation” and that she was now legally required to notify the gentleman listed on the document if she intended to leave the greater Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area for any period of time whatsoever. Laramie knew from the expression on the last interrogator’s face that she wasn’t free to go anywhere-they’d follow her everywhere she went, as had now been bluntly pointed out to have been the case for some time.

On the way home she pulled into the same 7-Eleven where she’d first used a pay phone to call Cooper and bought a vial of Advil, a Diet Pepsi, and a PowerBar. She swallowed eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen between Power Bar chunks and drove home, noting with neither surprise nor concern that one particular set of headlights seemed to find its way into her rearview mirror regardless of where she turned or how fast she drove. The car would drop back, vanish when she made a turn, then reappear, never coming closer than a few hundred yards behind.

As she pulled into her condo complex, she observed the guest parking lot adjoining her unit now featured three black sedans and one minivan, no single one of which she had ever seen parked here.

The garage door opened at the base of her town house and she slid inside.

It wasn’t until she pulled on the emergency brake and killed the engine that Laramie acknowledged how hungry she was. Still behind the wheel, she punched 411 on her cell phone, connected to Domino’s, and ordered a large pepperoni-and-green-pepper pizza. The delivery took a great deal longer than thirty minutes, and Laramie had a pretty good idea why. She didn’t ask the guy delivering the pizza whether he’d been pulled over by the police halfway through his run, or whether, when he was pulled over, the cops searched his Altima bumper to bumper, but figured that was about the size of it. The boy drove off-subject, no doubt, to another stop-and-search, probably for that same ineffective blinker.

She tried to make a phone call and got nothing in the way of a dial tone. She tried her cell phone, and got a message saying her service had been temporarily interrupted. She nodded, assuming they’d realized she could make calls with it once the pizza boy showed. Unfazed, she booted up the Dell desktop she kept in an alcove between the kitchen and living room, took a shot at checking for any e-mails, and failed to get an Internet connection. The Explorer status bar explained itself by saying, CANNOT LOCATE SERVER.

She changed into her nightshirt and looked in vain for a bottle of wine until she stumbled upon the jackpot of an unopened bottle of champagne in the back of the fridge. She shot the cork at the ceiling, kicked the lid off the pizza box, and never quite got around to turning on the television set while she sat on the couch and polished off all the Dom and seven-eighths of the pie.

She was thinking something to the effect that both Cooper and her father, when he’d been around, really had something with that alcoholism bit as she leaned her head back into the cushions and passed out for the night.

The hardware behind Spike Gibson’s perimeter security system required so much processing capacity that Gibson had been forced to invent a daisy-chained combination of servers to support it. He initially bought Crays, then later switched to Apple/IBM dual-G5 processor-based CPUs; he acquired the equipment through a ladder of American shell corporations, none traceable to the next.

His software oversaw a vast web of data capture, including military-grade radar and sonar systems, surface and submarine motion sensors, closed-circuit digital video feeds, and online control of a private satellite outfitted with spy cameras. The complexities of the system were such that during each twenty-four-hour period, the system required a short period of time-seven minutes and twenty-two seconds, to be exact-to reboot.

During the reboot window, the system’s data-capture inventory was tested in its entirety; all hardware, including processors and memory, were examined and updated; and all data collected during the prior twenty-four-hour period was digitally archived. Emergency power capacity for the island was tested-the power grid fed by the nuclear power cell in the main cavern was switched for five minutes to a gasoline-powered generator, then for another two minutes to a battery cell. In order for the system to work without any error whatsoever over the course of more than a decade, the daily reboot was a necessary evil, which Gibson attempted to minimize but still found imperative.

At least that was how he had explained matters to General Deng.

Gibson thought it more effective to spare General Deng the details, and thus had informed him of the daily reboot as a side note. Deng had never asked for clarification, and his apparent indifference to this minor nuisance worked particularly well for Gibson, who had, due to the window of darkness offered by the preposterously redundant daily reboot, conducted a highly regimented salvage operation of his own.