Another door clanged in the warehouse and now they heard faint voices.

“The culture was still matrilineal, though ownership of property was joint, but this was the Bronze Age and there were real towns and they were growing so fast that they encroached on each other’s hunting grounds and crops; conflicts began. Before this, security lay in worship and in finding harmony with nature. Now, the spear and sword became the main instruments of society. The importance of the male element of God grew and—”

The quick sound of a key in the art studio door was followed hard on by a thundering crash as the door flew open. A normal-sized man Zoe knew as Sergiev came through first, followed by her hulking jailor. A wave of cold air preceded them, fluttering papers and chilling more than just Zoe’s feet

“Talk about timing,” Thalia said in English. Then switching to Russian, she greeted the two men who scowled back at her.

Zoe sighed as she took a last glance at the statue as the dark reality returned.

“Come on!” Sergiev barked.

As she had every evening for more days than she cared to count, Zoe turned and held out her right hand. Her hulking jailor stood in a similar position, one end of a pair of handcuffs fastened to his postlike wrist, the other end dangling free.

Sergiev fastened Zoe’s wrist to the handcuff. Without another word, the Hulk headed for the door.

THIRTEEN

Halfway between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, on one thousand acres of rolling fields and forest, sits a sprawling complex of twenty buildings surrounded by triple cyclone fences ten feet high. The fences are topped with concertina wire whose razor-blade edges have been designed with one purpose in mind: the flaying of human flesh. One of the fences is electrified. Security forces, heavily armed and accompanied by attack dogs, patrol the two Strips of no-man’s-land traced by the three barriers.

In the daytime, more than fifty thousand people jam the twenty buildings protected by the three strands of cyclone fence. They work in the complex’s offices, buy stamps at its post office, get their hair cut at its barbershop, purchase cold medicine in its drugstore, take classes at its college, and watch programs broadcast by its television station, which is powered by the complex’s own electrical generating plant.

The visitor traveling along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway who happens to take the Fort Meade exit, and who happens to take a wrong turn after entering the army base, might happen to find himself looking through the meshwork of fences at a mammoth central building faced with green chipped stone. This is the Xanadu of spying, the Taj Mahal of eavesdropping, the colossus of intelligence gathering: the headquarters building of the National Security Agency.

In this one building is more usable office space than in the CIA’s Langley Headquarters and the U.S. Capitol combined. In its basement is the world’s largest concentration of computers, filled with so much sophisticated hardware that it is measured in acres. The last public leak put the concentration at more than eleven acres—enough to handle the computing needs of every business, large and small, in the United States.