In the course of my life, I'd spent maybe six months in Washington. Though it might not be fashionable to admit it, I like the place. Usually portrayed as a mass of greed-heads packed liked oiled sardines inside the Beltway, Washington has nice places to walk and good art to look at. People who like central Italy, the campagna, would like the rural landscape out in Virginia.

We got into National late, and picked up the car and a map. We wouldn't be right in Washington. According to Rufus, the server we were looking for was in Laurel, which is actually closer to Baltimorenot far, I noticed on the map, from Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency.

I'd had some dealings with the NSA when I was in the military and I'd always been impressed by two things: their employees' technical expertise and their arrogance. I hadn't had anything to do with the agency for a couple of decades, but because it was so heavily involved in computers, there was always a lot of back-and-forth between NSA computer geeks and the outside computer world.

Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tse-tung's private words on the president's desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.

No more. The world was rife with unbreakable codesany good university math department could whip one up in a matter of days. Just as bad, the most critical diplomatic and military traffic had come out of the air and gone underground, into fiber-optic cable. Even if a special forces team managed to get at a cable, messages were routinely encoded with ultrastrong encryption routines.

The NSA was going deaf. And the word was, they didn't know what to do about it. They'd become a bin full of aging bureaucrats worried about their jobs, and spinning further and further out of the Washington intelligence center.

LuEllen and I checked into a Ramada Inn off I-95 near Laurel, Maryland. Separate rooms, under separate IDs, gave us some easy options if there were trouble. In the burglary business, you never know when you might need a bolt-hole.

The next morning, after pancakes and coffee and The New York Times for me and The Wall Street Journal for LuEllen, we went looking for the server. The T-l line it used was located in a suburban office complex called the Carter-Byrd Center, building 2233. We found it fifteen minutes from the motel, two rows of four, two-story yellow-brick buildings, facing each other, behind small parking lots, on a dead-end street.

The tenants were professional services companies: accountants, financial advisors, a legal publishing firm, a title company, and several law firms. Most of them occupied an entire floor or building wing. The company we were looking for, Bloch Technology, was one of the small companies, grouped with other smaller companies, in a suite of offices in the end building on the right.

LuEllen, dressed in a dark blue business suit and navy low heels, clipped her miniature Panasonic movie camera into her briefcase, gave me a hot little kiss on the lips-going into a job always turned her on-and headed for 2233 to do the first reconnaissance. I waited in the car.

The idea was, she was looking for one of the other companies in Carter-Byrd, but got the building wrong. She'd be inside, we thought, for two or three minutes.

Fifteen minutes after she'd disappeared through the double glass doors, I was about ready to go in after her. Then she walked back outside, with a guy in a short-sleeved white shirt, who pointed up the hill toward the first building. She nodded, and they talked for a few more seconds, she laughed, patted his arm, and started for the car. I slumped a little lower in the passenger seat. The guy watched her go; he wasn't watching her shoulders.

As she came up to the car, I slumped another six inches. She climbed into the driver's seat, fired it up, backed out of the parking space, and we headed up the hill. "He's back inside," she said, as we pulled away.

I pushed myself up. "That took a while."

"I knocked on the doorit's got a Vermond combination pad, not alarmedand asked where Clayton Accounting was, and we got to chatting," she said. "Those computer people are amazing. They've got all these interesting machines."

"Really."

"Really. He's got five of them. They look like air conditioners, all lined up in the back room."

"Two rooms?"

"Three. One is a standard office, one has the computers, one has a futon on the floor and a miniature refrigerator where he keeps his Cokes."

"Is he in there alone?"

"There're two desks, but one of them looks pretty unusedlike maybe a part-timer. I got the phone number."

She'd pissed me off a little by casually talking to the guy. "We're gonna have to do a really light break. If we screw anything up, he'll remember talking to you. He'll remember your face."

"I thought it was worth the effort. And you know what? There is no security. The rest rooms are on the second floor. I went into the ladies' room, and there's a drop ceiling, but it's a mess above it. If we went up, and anybody came in to clean up. they'd know."

"So what do we do?"

"I'm thinking about it."

"All right." I looked at my watch. "Let's go get some deodorant, and then we can hang out for the day. You can think."

We found a drugstore, and I bought a travel-sized can of a woman's deodorant, the kind that advertises actual freshening powder in its spray, and a couple of Cokes. We drank the Cokes on the way back to Carter-Byrd. This time, LuEllen slumped in the seat while I went inside, carrying her briefcase so I looked like I had a reason to be there.

The building was essentially a long string of business offices opening off central hallways that ran the length of the building.

There was nobody in the hall when I walked inside, and I made a left, slipped the deodorant can out of my pocket, and gave it a couple of shakes. Bloch Technology was the third door on the left. I spotted the keypad as I came up, looked both ways, and then gave it a thorough spraying with the deodorant. I waved my hand in the air a couple of times to disperse the smell as best I could, then headed back out. Total time in the building, less than one minute. Total people encountered, none.

"So let's go hang out," I said.

We hung out, more or less; I took her to a driving range, where she hit golf balls, and very well, with a five-iron older than she was, and with a three-wood that was not only wood, but was no bigger than her fist. I did some quick sketches of her swing. Later, we caught a movie, and in between, I got back to Bobby, who had what he called a curiosity: a sudden spate of rumors on the Net that Firewall was planning a major attack. Bobby knew about Rufus and the Monger; I suggested that he call Rufus and have him trace the latest round of rumors. And I had a new question of my own, that popped into my head just as we were signing off. Bobby said:

will trace rumors soonest.

ok.

call tonight.

yes. new thought. look at airlines. see if jm flew in days before he was killed.

yes. will also check gas card. also, jpeg in your box.

thanks.

I downloaded the JPEG, which is a picture format, and saved it to examine later. After the movie, which sucked, LuEllen pointed me at a sporting goods store, where she bought a spool of black monofilament fishing line called Spider Wire. We went back to the motel, looked at the movies she'd made that morning at Blochfive Dell servers sitting on heavy plastic benches with a monitor and keyboard off to the sidethen had a slow dinner at a fast diner. The nerves were getting on top of me, like they always do. After dinner, we went back to the motel, picked up her bag, and at seven o'clock, when it was good and dark, we were back at Carter-Byrd.