"No problems?" I asked.

"It was a stretch, but I managed to pull it off."

"I'm relieved to know I passed the background check," I said ironically.

"Well, just barely."

"Thanks a lot." He paused, then lightly touched my back as I preceded him through a doorway.

"I don't need to tell you, Kay, that nothing you see or hear at ERF leaves the building."

"You're right, Benton. You don't need to tell me." Outside the Boardroom, the PX was packed with National Academy students in red shirts browsing at everything imaginable emblazoned with "FBI." Fit men and women politely passed us on steps as they headed to class, not a single blue shirt to be found in the color-coded crowd, for there had been no new agent classes in over a year. We followed a long corridor to the lobby, where a digital sign above the front desk reminded guests to keep visitor's passes properly displayed. Beyond the front doors, distant gunfire peppered the perfect afternoon. The Engineering Research Facility was three beige concrete-and-glass pods with large bay doors and high chain-link fences. Rows of parked cars bore testament to a population I never saw, for ERF seemed to swallow its employees and send them away at moments when the rest of us were unconscious. At the front door, Wesley paused by a sensor module with a numeric keypad that was attached to the wall. He inserted his right thumb over a reading lens, which scanned his print as the data display instructed him to type in his Personal Identification Number. The biometric lock was released with a faint click.

"Obviously, you've been here before," I commented as he held the door for me.

"Many times," he said.

I was left to wonder what business typically brought him here as we followed a beige-carpeted corridor, softly lit and silent, and more than twice the length of a football field. We passed laboratories where scientists in somber suits and lab coats were busily engaged in activities I knew nothing of and could not identify at a glance. Men and women worked in cubicles and over countertops scattered with tools, hardware, video displays, and strange devices. Behind windowless double doors a power saw whined through wood. At an elevator, Wesley's fingerprint was required again before we could access the rarefied quiet where Lucy spent her days. The second floor was, in essence, an air-conditioned cranium enclosing an artificial brain. Walls and carpet were muted gray, space precisely partitioned like an ice cube tray. Each cubicle contained two modular desks with sleek computers, laser printers, and piles of paper. Lucy was easy to spot. She was the only analyst wearing FBI fatigues.

Her back was to us as she talked into a telephone headset, one hand manipulating a stylus over a computerized message pad, the other typing on a keyboard. If I had not known better, I might have thought she was composing music.

"No, no," she said.

"One long beep followed by two short ones and we're probably talking about a malfunction with the monitor, maybe the board containing the video chips." She swiveled around in her chair when her peripheral vision picked us up.

"Yes, it's a huge difference if it's just one short beep," she explained to the person on the line.

"Now we're talking about a problem in a system board. Listen, Dave, can I get back with you?"

I noticed a biometric scanner on her desk, half buried beneath paper.

On the floor and filling a shelf overhead were formidable programming manuals, boxes of diskettes and tapes, stacks of computer and software magazines, and a variety of pale blue bound publications stamped with the Department of Justice seal.

"I thought I'd show your aunt what you're up to," Wesley said. Lucy slipped off the headset, and if she was happy to see us I could not tell.

"Right now I'm up to my ears in problems," she said.

"We're getting errors on a couple four-eighty-six machines." She added for my benefit, "We're using PCS to develop the Crime Artificial Intelligence Network known as CAIN."

"CAIN?" I marveled.

"That's a rather ironic acronym for a system designed to track violent criminals." Wesley said, "I suppose you could look at it as the ultimate act of contrition on the part of the world's first murderer. Or maybe it simply takes one to know one."

"Basically," Lucy went on, "our ambition is for CAIN to be an automated system that models the real world as much as possible."

"In other words," I said, "it's supposed to think and act the way we do."

"Exactly." She resumed typing.

"The crime analysis report you're accustomed to is right here." Appearing on the screen were queries from the familiar fifteen-page form I had been filling out for years whenever a body was unidentified or the victim of an offender who probably had murdered before and would again.

"It's been condensed a little." Lucy brought up more pages.

"The form's never really been the problem," I pointed out.

"It's getting the investigator to complete the darn thing and send it in."

"Now they'll have choices," Wesley said.

"They can have a dumb terminal in their precinct that will allow them to sit down and fill in the form on-line. Or for the true Luddite, we have paper-a bubble form or the original one, which can be sent off as usual or faxed."

"We're also working with handwriting recognition technology," Lucy went on.

"Computerized message pads can be used while the investigator's in his car, the squad room, waiting around for court. And anything we get on paper-handwritten or otherwise-can be scanned into the system.

"The interactive part comes when CAIN gets a hit or needs supplementary information. He'll actually communicate with the investigator by modem, or by leaving messages in voice or by electronic mail."

"The potential's enormous," Wesley said to me.

I knew the real reason he had brought me here. This cubicle felt far removed from inner-city field offices, bank robberies, and drug busts. Wesley wanted me to believe if Lucy worked for the Bureau, she would be safe. Yet I knew better, for I understood the ambushes of the mind. The clean pages my young niece was showing me in her pristine computer would soon carry names and physical descriptions that would make violence real. She would build a data base that would become a landfill of body parts, tortures, weapons and wounds. And one day she would hear the silent screams. She would imagine the faces of victims in crowds she passed.

"I assume what you're applying to police investigators will also have meaning for us," I said to Wesley.

"It goes without saying that medical examiners will be part of the network." Lucy showed us more screens and elaborated on other marvels in words difficult even for me. Computers were the modern Babel, I had decided. The higher technology reached, the greater the confusion of tongues.

"That's the thing about Structure Query Language," she was explaining.

"It's more declarative than navigational, meaning the user specifies what he wants accessed from the data base instead of how he wants it accessed."

I had begun watching a woman walking in our direction. She was tall, with a graceful but strong stride, a long lab coat flowing around her knees as she slowly stirred a paintbrush in a small aluminum can.

"Have we decided what we're going to run this on eventually?" Wesley continued chatting with my niece.

"A mainframe?"

"Actually, the trend is toward downsized client data base server environments. You know, minis, LANS. Everything gets smaller." The woman turned into our cubicle, and when she looked up, her eyes went straight to mine and held for a piercing instant before shifting away.

"Was there a meeting scheduled that I didn't know about?" she said with a cool smile as she set the can on her desk. I got the distinct impression she was displeased by the intrusion.