The listening devices in her hotel room were of Israeli design, but at least five years old. That told Special Agent Monroe she wasn’t dealing with Mossad. Or the NIA. Or even with some embarrassing effort by Tusk Musso’s security team to monitor her presence in their midst. No, the Verint Systems bugs she found in the land-line phone, the alarm clock and the dead television set were the sort of cast-offs Tel Aviv would be happy to hand over to Blackstone’s security services as an unacknowledged part of the wider technology-transfer agreement he had with the Israeli Government. It took her less than ten minutes to sweep the room and locate them all.

No biggie, she thought.

She left the devices in place. No point tipping off anybody at Fort Hood. Colonel Murdoch wouldn’t have thought to look for such things. Not here in Temple, anyway. She re-examined and discarded the idea that Musso might’ve planted them. The tech wasn’t standard issue for the feds, and the chances of him acting so stupidly were as close to zero as made no difference. He was aware of her capabilities, at least in a basic sense. The only question she had was whether to inform him that his own security had been compromised.

Again. A no-brainer. She’d keep the information to herself.

A few hours stretched out ahead for Colonel Murdoch, before McCutcheon was due to arrive. She had her own traps and snares to put in place before the evening, in preparation for which she would need the help of Musso and at least one of his staff in the bar downstairs. That took all of ten minutes to organise, by which time the rain had eased off, allowing her the chance to explore the streets around the Federal Center and familiarise herself with what she thought of as her lay-up point.

There wasn’t much to see. The Corps of Engineers had done an excellent job of clearing the debris of apocalypse, large and small, from the neighbourhood. If it weren’t for the damaged shopfronts, the occasional burnt-out building shell and the large numbers of broken windows on the upper floors along Main Street, it could have been any small city on a wet public holiday. No traffic, very few people walking around, nothing open.