"But who will have the last laugh if we find out it's goats being led around by a Sherpa with a crook?"

Gloria smiled.

"You will." "Maybe we should bet on it," Viens said.

"Your micro cam against my lapel pin." "No go," Gloria said.

"Why not?" Viens asked.

"Mine has the range."

"And mine has the substance," she replied.

The NRO recon expert had once showed her the MIT lapel pin he had customized. It contained a dot-sized microphone made of molecules that resonated one against the other. It could broadcast sound to his computer audio recorder up to two hundred miles away. Her micro cam was better than that.

It broadcast million-pixel images to her computer from up to ten miles away. It was better and it was much more useful.

"Okay," Viens said.

"Then let's bet dinner? The loser cooks?

It's a fitting deal. Infrared image, microwave meals-"

"I'm a lousy cook," said Gloria.

"I'm not."

"Thanks, but no," said the thrice-divorced woman. For some reason Viens had always had a crush on her. She liked him too but he was young enough to be her son.

"We'll make it a gentle person bet," she said.

"If you found the Pakistanis, we both win."

Viens sighed.

"A diplomat's deal. I accept, but under protest."

Tall, slender Gloria Gold smiled and leaned back in her chair. She was sitting at her glass-topped desk in Op-Center's technical sector. The lights of her office were off. The only glow came from the twenty-one-inch computer monitor. The halls were silent. She took a swig from the bottle of Evian water she kept on the floor. After knocking over a bottle and shorting her computer the night after she first came to work here, Gloria had learned not to keep anything liquid on her desk. Luckily her boss. Assistant Director Curt Hardaway-"the Night Commander," as they called him-admitted that he had once done that as well. Whether he had done that or not it was a nice thing to say.

The levity about the bet had been welcome. She had only been at this an hour but Viens had been working all day.

And the elements in the image-feed from the NRO did look very promising.

They were at five-meter resolution, meaning that anything down to five meters long was visible. The computer's simultaneous PAP-photographic analysis profile-had identified what it thought could be human shadows.

Distorted by the terrain and angle of the sun, they were coming from under an intervening ledge. Infrared would ascertain whether the shadows were being generated by living things or rock formations. The fact that the shadows had shifted between two images did not tell them much. That could simply be an illusion of the moving sun.

The Op-Center veteran watched and waited. The quiet of night shift made the delay somehow seem longer.