“How long have you been there?”

“A long time. I thought I was going to be the first woman director.”

I said nothing.

“I would have told you,” she said. “I promise, if I’d had another agent in there I would have told you.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

“It’s the stress,” she said. “Undercover is tough.”

I nodded. “It’s like a hall of mirrors up there. One damn thing after another. Everything feels unreal.”

We left our half-finished cups on the table and headed out, into the mall’s interior sidewalks, and then outside into the rain. We had parked near each other. She kissed me on the cheek. Then she got into her Taurus and headed south and I got into the Saab and headed north.

Paulie took his own sweet time about opening the gate for me. He made me wait a couple of minutes before he even came lumbering out of his house. He still had his slicker on. Then he stood and stared for a minute before he went near the latch. But I didn’t care. I was busy thinking. I was hearing Duffy’s voice in my head: I’m revising the mission. Most of my military career a guy named Leon Garber was either directly or indirectly my boss. He explained everything to himself by making up little phrases or sayings. He had one for every occasion. He used to say: Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad. He didn’t mean money in any literal sense. He meant manpower, resources, time, will, effort, energy. He used to contradict himself, too. Just as often he would say: Never ever get distracted from the exact job in hand. Of course, proverbs are like that generally. Too many cooks spoil the broth, many hands make light work, great minds think alike, fools never differ. But overall, after you canceled out a few layers of contradiction, Leon approved of revision. He approved of it big time. Mainly because revision was about thinking, and he figured thinking never hurt anybody. So I was thinking, and thinking hard, because I was aware that something was slowly and imperceptibly creeping up on me, just outside of my conscious grasp. Something connected to something Duffy had said to me: You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.

I heard the gate swing back. Looked up to see Paulie waiting for me to drive through. The rain was beating on his slicker. He still had no hat. I exacted some petty revenge by waiting a minute myself. Duffy’s revision suited me well enough. I didn’t care much about Beck. I really didn’t, either way. But I wanted Teresa. And I would get her. I wanted Quinn, too. And I would get him too, whatever Duffy said. The revision was only going to go so far.

I checked on Paulie again. He was still waiting. He was an idiot. He was out in the rain, I was in a car. I took my foot off the brake and rolled slowly through the gate. Then I accelerated hard and headed down to the house.

I put the Saab away in the slot I had once seen it in and walked out into the courtyard. The mechanic was still in the third garage. The empty one. I couldn’t see what he was doing. Maybe he was just sheltering from the rain. I ran back to the house. Beck heard the metal detector announce my arrival and came into the kitchen to meet me. He pointed at his sports bag. It was still there on the table, right in the center.

“Get rid of this shit,” he said. “Throw it in the ocean, OK?”

“OK,” I said. He went back out to the hallway and I picked up the bag and turned around. Headed outside again and slipped down the ocean side of the garage block wall. I put my bundle right back in its hidden dip. Waste not, want not. And I wanted to be able to return Duffy’s Glock to her. She was already in enough trouble without having to add the loss of her service piece to the list. Most agencies take that kind of a thing very seriously.

Then I walked on to the edge of the granite tables and swung the bag and hurled it far out to sea. It pinwheeled end over end in the air and the shoes and the e-mail unit were thrown clear. I saw the e-mail thing hit the water. It sank immediately. The left shoe hit toe-first and followed it. The bag parachuted a little and landed gently facedown and filled with water and turned over and slipped under. The right shoe floated for a moment, like a tiny black boat. It pitched and yawed and bobbed urgently like it was trying to escape to the east. It rode up over a peak and rode down on the far side of the crest. Then it started to list sideways. It floated maybe ten more seconds and then it filled with water and sank without a trace.

There was no activity in the house. The cook wasn’t around. Richard was in the family dining room eating a sandwich he must have made for himself and staring out at the rain. Elizabeth was still in her parlor, still working on Doctor Zhivago. By a process of elimination I figured Beck must be in his den, maybe sitting in his red leather chair and looking at his machine gun collection. There was quiet everywhere. I didn’t understand it. Duffy had said they had five containers in and Beck had said he had a big weekend coming up, but nobody was doing anything.

I went up to Duke’s room. I didn’t think of it as my room. I hoped I never would. I lay down on the bed and started thinking again. Tried to chase whatever it was hovering way in the back of my mind. It’s easy, Leon Garber would have said. Work the clues. Go through everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard. So I went through it. But I kept coming back to Dominique Kohl. The fifth time I ever saw her, she drove me to Aberdeen, Maryland, in an olive-green Chevrolet. I was having second thoughts about letting genuine blueprints out into the world. It was a big risk. Not usually something I would worry about, but I needed more progress than we were making. Kohl had identified the dead-drop site, and the drop technique, and where and when and how Gorowski was letting his contact know that the delivery had been made. But she still hadn’t seen the contact make the pickup. Still didn’t know who he was.

Aberdeen was a small place twenty-some miles north and east of Baltimore. Gorowski’s method was to drive down to the big city on a Sunday and make the drop in the Inner Harbor area. Back then the renovations were in full swing and it was a nice bright place to be but the public hadn’t caught on all the way yet and it stayed pretty empty most of the time. Gorowski had a POV. It was a two-year-old Mazda Miata, bright red. It was a plausible car, all things considered. Not new, but not cheap either, because it was a popular model back then and nobody could get a discount off sticker, so used values held up well. And it was a two-seater, which was no good for his baby girls. So he had to have another car, too. We knew his wife wasn’t rich. It might have worried me in someone else, but the guy was an engineer. It was a characteristic choice. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. Entirely plausible that he would hoard his spare dollars and spring for something with a sweet manual change and rear-wheel drive.

The Sunday we followed him he parked in a lot near one of the Baltimore marinas and went to sit on a bench. He was a squat hairy guy. Wide, but not tall. He had the Sunday newspaper with him. He spent some time gazing out at the sailboats. Then he closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sky. The weather was still wonderful. He spent maybe five minutes just soaking up the sun like a lizard. Then he opened his eyes and opened his paper and started to read it.

“This is his fifth time,” Kohl whispered to me. “Third trip since they finished with the sabot stuff.”

“Standard procedure so far?” I asked.

“Identical,” she said.

He kept busy with the paper for about twenty minutes. I could tell he was actually reading it. He paid attention to all the sections, except for sports, which I thought was a little odd for a Yankees fan. But then, I guessed a Yankees fan wouldn’t like the Orioles stuffed down his throat all the time.