“Find something first,” she reminded herself, and typed another phrase.

Babylon Sisters.

Thornton had surely given her the password for a reason. The words meant something too. It was another memory from her childhood, more voices from the airy, bright apartment on the Aventine hill. Of some old rock number getting played over and over again by a band her father and his friends all adored.

The band was Steely Dan. “Babylon Sisters” was the long, jazzy number he loved so much that someone-but who?-had called him “Steely Dan Deacon” once and it stuck.

With good reason too. It wasn’t just that, back in Rome before the sourness and the divorce consumed him, Dan Deacon loved that kind of music: cool, jazz-tinged rock, stuff Emily could never quite pin down, with weird, only half-comprehensible lyrics. It was because he was a tough guy too. The last few years he’d been alive he was so damn tough she scarcely dared go near him.

She glanced at her watch-just fifteen minutes left on the system and nothing to show so far-and cursed herself, racked her brain for more of the numbers he and his buddies loved, listening to them over and over on the Bose hi-fi in the living room. They still sat in her head, dim stains on her consciousness from a time when music, for her, meant weekly piano lessons struggling with Hindemith under the sour gaze of a stuck-up old woman smelling of lavender in an apartment in the neighbouring block.

Such a contrast to the rolling, unpredictable keyboards, stabs of lyrical guitar and the weird, weird lyrics her dad loved.

“Babylon Sisters” most of all, with the throwaway line that came straight after the title, sung so rapidly you had to strain to catch the phrase.

Shake it.

She could picture her dad-Steely Dan Deacon-just a touch drunk with a couple of guys from work, singing along to the track, dancing, half swaying the way men did in that condition, yelling those words out loud.

“You are so goddamn awful at this job, Emily Deacon,” she whispered to herself. “Any moment now Joel Leapman is going to walk in, see what you’re doing and put you on the first plane home.”

And then she would never find out what had happened, never get to the bottom of the sacred cut.

The network had one of those freeform text-searching systems, a kind of internal SuperGoogle reserved for spooks. You could throw any number of different terms at it-“purple Transylvanian banana fetish igloo”-and it would trawl all the zillions of words it kept in its maw, try and put two and two together to make four, then shoot a few answers straight back at you within seconds.

It was clever for a machine, which meant it had the combined IQ of a million worker ants if you were lucky enough to hit the right buttons.

She typed in “Bill Kaspar Dan Deacon Iraq.”

The same old stuff as before shot up on the screen-page upon page of documents, no particular order, no particular sense. Days of work. Weeks maybe.

She looked at her watch again. The minutes were flying by now. Soon the shutters would come down for good. Thornton Fielding was risking a lot here. His career. Maybe more. She owed it to him to get better at this.

“Sacred Cut Bill Kaspar Iraq.”

It just got worse. There was all manner of crap creeping in now and she knew why. “Sacred cut” meant nothing to the system.

Wherever that came from happened after.

“Think of the song, stupid,” she muttered. “Think of Bill Kaspar. Think of what Thornton was trying to tell you.”

The user name wasn’t BillK. It was WillFK.

Some people liked to shorten their names in conversation and keep it formal on paper. Some people had middle names. The FBI was an institution. The higher up the ladder you got, the more likely you were to gain a few affectations along the way.

She typed in “William F. Kaspar Steely Dan Deacon” and said a little prayer to whatever silicon god lived behind that screen, asking it to cut her a little slack, serve up a soupçon of mercy for a change, pick the right team of worker ants for this problem because, in all truth, she desperately needed them right now.

The system chugged. A document came up with a date from 1990. Then the message: Access denied.

“Shit,” she muttered and watched it chug through six other files blocked by the same rule. “Shit, shit, shit…”

The network was running with all the speed of an octogenarian athlete. It was hopeless. It was dumb. It was typical of her career in the FBI.

Then Emily Deacon, more out of desperation than anything, typed in “William F. Kaspar Steely Dan Babylon Sisters Shake It,” sat back and wondered what she’d do next. Go see the good-looking Italian cop at his gorgeous farmhouse out there in the snowy wilds, open her hands and say, “Got nothing. How about some wine? Why don’t we forget about everything for a while and just talk because I like talking to you.”

Nic Costa hadn’t even come close to making a pass. It was odd. It was so un-Italian because she had a feeling he’d like to, really.

“Ask me, Nic, because I’m going crazy staring at this stupid computer,” she whispered.

Somewhere-in Miami or Washington, Seattle or on a server just down the hall-a hard drive flipped into life and popped a single, unrestricted document on the screen.

It was just a memo. A scanned memo too, not a whole chunk of real, readable text, which may have been why it slipped through the security cracks. She checked the keywords some dumb underling had assigned to it. Just two: “Shake It.”

Ha, ha.

She was breathless. She felt stupidly alive. This was the only chance. Take it or leave it, because this never comes again.

So…

Emily Deacon cast a quick look at the door, saw no one beyond it, then took the tiny digital camera out of her purse, the one she kept for road accidents and shots of buildings, sights that interested her out of the blue. Then, trying not to tremble, she snapped the screen, and the next one, and the one after that.

From: William F. Kaspar

To: Steely Dan B. et al

Date: 1991, near as dammit

Subject: Babylon Sisters

Status: you have to ask?

Let it be known that I, William F. Kaspar, the Lizard King, the Holy Owl, Grand Master of the Universe, etcetera, etcetera, shall be attending the court of the Scarlet Beast presently, accompanied by my royal harem, and I demand-DEMAND-fealty from you lazy, good-for-nothing, pasta-sucking ingrates.

There is a purpose, acolytes. A great one: mayhem.

The Scarlet Beast has charged us with creating mayhem. We possess a God-given duty to deliver and it is a mighty relief to old Bill K this faceless bastard has volunteered you already. Though I cannot help but wonder, dear friend, whether you didn’t understand that all along. NTK, huh?

I read the cast list. A few men I know. A few are new but I guess we’re gonna love “em all the same. Plus I’m bringing a couple of ladies of my own too, since we live in emancipated days and they can do things with radios and computers and stuff that beats the living shit out of me. Though I cannot help but wonder, dear friend, whether you didn’t know that all along. NTK, huh?

Practicalities.

1. The Scarlet Beast is a generous Beast, though I guess you know that already! Those figures you sent me are enough to keep us going for six months in the desert if some spine-deficient pen-pusher in the Pentagon starts to get cold feet and wonders whether we shouldn’t just pick up the phone, call Saddam and say: please, pretty please, mister, just pack up your tanks and your soldiers and walk all the way home to Baghdad.

2. We got immunity. Hell, we got more immunity than a Klansman in Alabama. We can do what we like, when we like, and no one’s ever going to care. (Am I telling you something you don’t know here or what, boy?)