‘There’s no trail,’ she went on. ‘If someone is in there, he’s leaving no tracks. And that’s not possible. You can’t just go into the system and tell it to send messages or do anything else without the audit log reflecting it. And we have a printer running morning, noon and night that prints every keystroke made by anybody for any reason.’

‘Why are you getting angry?’ I said.

‘Because I’m tired of being blamed for the problems over there. The break-in wasn’t my fault. I had no idea that someone who worked right next to me …’ She took another drag. ‘Well, I only said I’d fix it because I was asked to. Because the senator asked me to. Or asked you, really …’

‘Lucy, I’m not aware that anyone is blaming you for problems with CAIN,’ I said gently.

Anger burned brighter in her eyes. ‘If I’m not being blamed, I wouldn’t have been assigned to a room up here. What this constitutes is house arrest.’

‘Nonsense. I stay here every time I come to Quantico, and I’m certainly not under house arrest.’

‘They put you here for security and privacy,’ she said. ‘But that’s not why I’m here. I’m being blamed again. I’m being watched. I can tell it in the way certain people are treating me over there.’ She nodded in the direction of ERF, which was across the street from the Academy.

‘What happened today?’ I asked.

She went into the kitchen, ran water over the cigarette butt and dropped it into the disposal. She sat back down and didn’t say anything. I studied her and got more unsettled. I did not know why she was this angry, and whenever she acted in a way that could not be explained, I was frightened again.

Lucy’s car accident could have been fatal. Her head injury could have ruined her most remarkable gift, and I was assaulted by images of hematomas and a skull fractured like a hard-boiled egg. I thought of the woman we called Jane with her shaved head and scars, and I imagined Lucy in places where no one knew her name.

‘Have you been feeling all right?’ I asked my niece.

She shrugged.

‘What about the headaches?’

‘I still get them.’ Suspicion shadowed her eyes. ‘Sometimes the Midrin helps. Sometimes it just makes me throw up. The only thing that really works is Fiorinal. But I don’t have any of that.’

‘You don’t need any of that.’

‘You’re not the one who gets the headaches.’

‘I get plenty of headaches. You don’t need to be on barbiturates,’ I answered. ‘You’re sleeping and eating all right, and getting exercise?’

‘What is this, a doctor’s appointment?’