In contrast to Catherine, twenty-eight-year-old Andy Shoal was having a hell of a good time. He’d been given the night off of his evening duties as a cops reporter so he could spend the daytime hours in studios and on the phone, making a dizzying series of local and secondary radio and cable shows, talking about how he and his “partner” Catherine King had stumbled onto a terrorist assassin being hunted by the CIA on America’s streets. He talked about the Washington Highlands shoot-out, about Chevy Chase, Dupont Circle, and Columbia Heights, and he made it out like he was Bernstein to King’s Woodward.

In each interview he hinted there were more big revelations to come about the assassin only known as Jeff Duncan, but at this point he was pretty much relying on his senior colleague to make that happen.

Catherine did have a couple of potential leads. She had been checking her e-mail just before seven this morning, filtering through the messages she could put off till this whirlwind of publicity passed and trashing the items from the usual suspects of nut jobs who sent her long missives any time she posted an article. During this morning’s scroll through her messages she held on to five e-mails that looked like they needed her direct attention. Three were from intelligence community contacts of hers offering context about her most recent article, although none of them promised very much. Indeed, they looked more like people trying to get on her bandwagon this week by getting mentioned in a follow-up article, and less like people who had significant information to offer.

The other two e-mails were from unknowns. One claimed to have intelligence about the people killed on Brandywine Street, insisting they were not, as she and Andy had reported, Aryan Brotherhood drug dealers, but rather NSA technicians operating some sort of illegal domestic listening post.

This sounded like complete nonsense to Catherine, but the sender of the e-mail seemed intelligent enough. She decided she’d feel him out with a few follow-up questions before deciding whether or not to set up a phone interview.

The fifth potentially promising e-mail to arrive this morning, however, had her especially curious. It came from an address that looked randomly generated—all numbers and letters—and the sender’s message was both specific and compelling.