"I'm sorry I got you into this," he said.

"Which 'this' do you mean?" she asked. "This little raid or this whole stinking, lousy business?"

"The raid," he said. "I shouldn't have imposed on our…" He stopped to search for the right word, settled reluctantly on "friendship."

"It's all right," Nancy said. "Really it is, Paul. A big part of me is tired of running and of depending on Demain and on the whole expatriate life that you have to be drawn to to enjoy. What was it that Sydney Carton said on the way to the scaffold in A Tale of Two Cities? 'It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done.' This is far, far better than the things I've done till now."

Hood smiled warmly. He wanted to tell her not to worry about the scaffold. But he couldn't guarantee her fate any more than he could swear to her allegiance. As the plane landed gently on the soil of France, he only hoped that the worry on her face was for her future and not his.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Thursday, 2:59 P.M.,

Washington, D.C.

Hood's wireless transmission was received by Darrell McCaskey's executive assistant Sharri Jurmain. The FBI Academy graduate E-mailed it to McCaskey's personal computer and to Dr. John Benn of Op-Center's Rapid Information Search Center.

The RI-Search Center was little more than two small, interconnected offices with twenty-two computers run by two full-time operators and overseen by Dr. Benn. A former librarian with the Library of Congress, the British-born bachelor had been an embassy researcher in Qatar for two years when the Arab state declared its independence from Britain in 19? 1. Benn remained there for seven years before moving to Washington to stay with his sister when her diplomat-husband died. Charmed by Washington and by Americans, Benn remained behind after his sister returned to England. He became an American citizen in 1988.

Benn's proud, singular skill, acquired during his otherwise uneventful years in Qatar, was quoting obscure lines of dialogue from English literature. Even with the help of Usenet groups, no one at Op-Center had ever correctly identified a single one of Benn's characterizations.

Benn was taking an early tea and pretending to be Mr. Boffin from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend when Hood's E-mail request came through. It was heralded by a synthesized electronic voice calling out, "I will arise and go now" from Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree, followed by the identification number of the person making the request.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more," Benn said with a flourish as they swung to the number one screen. He and his assistants Sylvester Neuman and Alfred Smythe immediately recognized Stoll's "greeting," the:-), his "smiley face" lying on its side. In one of his more paranoid moments, Stoll had arranged with them that if he were ever being forced to transmit data, he would input:-(, a frowning face.