"That's true," Hood said. "The FBI did come to my apartment. They questioned me, without telling me what you'd done, and I agreed to let them know if I heard from you."

"You did?" she seemed surprised. "You'd have turned me in?"

"Yes," he said. "Only I never would have abandoned you."

"You'd have had no choice," she said. "There would have been a trial, I'd have gone to prison--"

"That's true. But I'd have waited."

"Twenty years?"

"If that's how long it took," Hood said. "But it wouldn't have. Industrial espionage committed by a young woman in love-- you'd have been able to plea-bargain and been free in five years."

"Five years," she said. "And then you'd have married a criminal?"

"No. You."

"Okay, an ex-con. No one would've trusted me-- or you-- around any kind of a secret. Your dreams of a life in politics, would have ended."

"So what?" he said. "Instead, I felt as though my life had ended."

Nancy stopped speaking. She smiled again. "Poor Paul," she said. "That's all very romantic and just a little theatrical, which is one of the things I loved about you. But the truth is, your life didn't end when I left. You met someone else, someone quite lovely. You married. You had the children you wanted. You settled down."

I settled, he thought before he could stop himself. He hated himself for thinking it and apologized silently to Sharon.

"What did you do after you left?" Hood asked, wanting to talk instead of think.

"I moved to Paris," Nancy said, "and I tried to get a job designing computer software. But there wasn't a lot for me to do there. There wasn't much of a market yet and there was a real protectionist thing going, keeping Americans from taking French jobs. So after burning through the blood money I'd been paid-- it's expensive to live in Paris, especially when you have to bribe officials because you can't get a visa and have your name show up at the American Embassy-- I moved to Toulouse and began working for the company."

"The company?"

"The one I sold the secrets to," she said. "I don't want to tell you the name, because I don't want you doing anything out of your famous white-knight spite. Because you know you would."

Nancy was right. He'd have gone back to Washington and found a dozen different ways for the U.S. government to lean on them.