It was two in the morning, the heart of darkness, the time of deepest loneliness. I thought of Morrell, in Mazär-i-Sharif and wondered if he, too, was awake and lonely or if his old friend Marcie Love was keeping him company. Or perhaps a new friend more in tune with his mind than I had been.

These were such strange times we were living through, the Age of Fear, with endless war around the world, never knowing who we could trust, with our bank accounts and our e-mails an open book to any garden-variety hacker. Even though I use the Web constantly, I’m an old-fashioned detective. I do better on foot and in person than through the ether.

Someone had gone after Petra the old-fashioned way, breaking into her apartment. Had they made off with her laptop, or had she taken it with her? I looked again at the rudimentary surveillance footage from my office camera that I’d e-mailed myself. It didn’t look to me as though any of the office breakers—Petra or her two companions—were carrying a backpack or anything big enough to be holding her laptop. So someone had gone after that, looking for … her e-mails, I supposed … or to see whether she’d been looking up African national heroes.

Spy software. Of course, Petra had used my office computer, my big Mac Pro, one night at the beginning of the summer. That was how she’d known my keypad code. I wasn’t a high-tech wizard, but I knew enough to see which websites she’d been looking at. They might tell me something. And it was better, anyway, than sitting in the dark, feeling the Age of Fear close in on me.

I started to get dressed again, but I paused while zipping my jeans. I had to assume from now on that whatever I did, wherever I went, I’d have some shadow from Homeland Security, or Mountain Hawk, or maybe both, and I’d just as soon not be caught alone on the streets in the middle of the night. Even if I could sneak out to my car, it was possible—perhaps probable—that they’d installed some kind of GPS tracker in it, some little gizmo I wouldn’t be able to find easily. They wouldn’t have to stay with me on the streets to keep tabs on me. They could use their hotshot triangulation software to watch me online.

A thump on the back stairs made my heart jump again. I took the Smith & Wesson and slipped into the kitchen, tiptoeing on the tile. I laid my head against the door and squinted out through the glass. And felt another bubble of hysteria rise in me. The sound was Jake Thibaut, hauling his double bass up the back stairs to the third floor.