“But they can’t?” Donoghue watches Lucy carefully.

“I have no automatic log-ons, nothing that’s going to help them look at anything important. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of their motivation. They want to use my personal technology, my personal communication software as a gateway.”

“It’s important to accept that they don’t want just one thing.” Janet’s repeated comment is making me curious.

“What could they want?” Donoghue again asks me. “One thing, two things, however many things? What might they want that’s in your database for example?”

“They may not know what they’re looking for,” I decide. “It may be something they don’t know enough about to list on a warrant.”

“A fishing expedition in other words.”

“They may be casting a net for something they don’t want to draw attention to or have no authority to request. Or they may not even know how to request it or what or why, and mind you I’m coming up with any imaginable bonuses that might entice them to go after Lucy,” I explain. “For sure she’s a path that leads to me. For sure she’s a means of getting to me, for acquiring extremely confidential information that relates to both local and federal law enforcement and also in some instances to the military and other government agencies including the intelligence community.”

“You have CIA, NSA cases in your computer system?” This piques Donoghue’s attention.

“We have data that are of interest to our State Department. That’s as much as I’m going to say about it.”

“Have you had any recent cases of that nature?” she asks.

“I can’t discuss it.” I’m thinking about Joel Fagano, a New York forensic accountant found dead in a Boston hotel room last month.

The door was bolted from the inside with a DO NOT DISTURB sign turned on, and what appeared an obvious suicide by hanging wouldn’t have aroused my suspicion had the federal government not showed up for the autopsy. The two FBI agents turned out to be a stalking horse for the CIA, and it wasn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. Spies die in car and plane crashes. They kill themselves and get murdered like other people but there’s a big difference.

When it’s a government operative the assumption has to be foul play. But in Fagano’s case there wasn’t any. Every finding was consistent with him looping a belt around his neck and cutting off the oxygen to his brain, and I remember Benton’s cryptic comment that Fagano took the only power he had when he took his own life—that he must have feared something much more than death. And it lands hard on me.

Data fiction.