She made an effort to control her own breathing. She was already angry. And in a way the anger was not unwelcome. It beat feeling guilty, the mood in which her encounters usually left her. "What people?"

"Let me just remind you of the larger issues," he said. "Bear with me. It's easy to forget what's at stake.

The nature and definition of the human genome, of what we are as a people, all of us. That's been put at risk by everything from the cloning trade to these Martian longevity cults, and there are people in every government in the world who spend a lot of time thinking about that."

His credo, the same justification, Lise recalled, that he had once offered to her mother. "What does that have to do with me?" Or Turk, for that matter.

"You came to me with an old snapshot taken at one of your dad's faculty parties, so I ran it through the database—"

"You offered to run it through the database."

"I offered, okay, and we pulled an image from the dockland security cameras. But when you run a check like that, the query gets bumped around a little bit. And I guess something rang a bell somewhere. Within the last week we've had people from Washington show up here—"

"What do you mean, DGS people?"

"DGS people, right, but very senior, people working out of levels of the department light-years above what we do here. People who are deeply interested in finding the woman in the picture. People interested enough to sail out of Djakarta and knock on my door."

Lise sat back in her chair and tried to absorb all this.

After a long moment she said, "My mother showed the same snapshot to DGS back when my father disappeared. Nobody made a fuss about it then."

"That was a decade ago. Other information has turned up since. The same face in a different context.

More than that I can't say."

"I'd like to talk to these people. If they know anything about Sulean Moi—"

"Nothing that would help you find out what happened to your father."

"How can you be sure of that?"

"Try to put it in perspective, Lise. These people are doing an important job. They mean business. I went out of my way to convince these guys not to talk to you."

"But you gave them my name?"

"I told them everything I know about you, because otherwise they might think you're involved in—well, what they're investigating. Which would be a waste of their time and a hardship for you. Honestly, Lise.

You have to keep a low profile on this one."

"They're watching me. Is that what you're trying to say? They're watching me and they know I was with Turk."

He winced at the name, but nodded. "They know those things. Yes."

"Jesus, Brian!"