“So you did know she was wandering around there,” Edwards said to his mother. “And you did nothing to stop her!”

“I only learned on Friday.” For once, Renee was on the defensive. “I called Rick Salvi to tell him someone was hiding in the house; o? course I didn’t tell him it was someone Catherine was meeting.”

“Even so,” Edwards burst out, “you should have-“

“I thought I had Catherine well under my eye,” Renee said. “I looked in on her at midnight, right before I phoned Rick, and she was-she seemed to be -sleeping. I thought I’d have the problem solved before she woke up in the morning. Instead, she apparently waited for me to check on her, then went out her window onto the veranda roof and slid down a column to the ground. When I heard shots coming from the woods, I went back to her room-and found her gone. I don’t think anyone ever covered that ground to Larchmont faster than I did that night. Which was fortunate, since when I got there they were staring down at Catherine as if she were a movie they were watching. They hadn’t even sent for an ambulance.”

Edwards’s eyes flashed. “I’m sure your organizational skills saved her life. It’s a pity you didn’t apply them to keeping her from risking it.”

“She’s your daughter, Eds, she’ll do what she wants to do no matter how much I try to engineer a different outcome.” Renee spoke with the kind of saintly resignation that makes the hearer long to belt the speaker.

Edwards took a breath and turned to me. “How deep is her involvement with the kid, with Sadawi?”

“I’ve only met your daughter a few times, but I think she was in love with the romance of the situation, not with the young man himself. What did your buddies in Washington learn about him? Is he a serious security threat?”

“We don’t know anything about him, per se, but he’s connected to a

suspect group. The mosque that he frequents puts out some pretty fiery rhetoric, and he’s been renting a room from one of their members, a guy who’s sent money to the Brothers in Harmony Foundation.”

“I take it these Brothers aren’t in harmony with American interests?” I pursued.

“Oh, they’re murky, like all these groups. We know they’ve sent an X-ray machine to the Chechen rebels; they’ve bought food for Egyptian families, but we believe other funds get funneled through honey sales into AlQaeda hands.”

The Spadona Foundation has a direct pipeline to the current administration. As I’d hoped, taking for granted that Edwards had spoken to the attorney general got him to answer without realizing he was being pumped. The fact that anger with his mother had knocked him off balance helped.

“An X-ray machine hardly sounds very dangerous, Eds,” Renee remarked. “You’re surely not imagining it can be used to make nuclear weapons.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mother, don’t let your hostility to the attorney general and his methods blind you to the reality of how dangerous our enemies are.”