'Call me Tom,' he replied, ignoring her question. 'Someone, either you or Agent Atta, said you were certain that Neil was responsible for what we saw on that BD. How? How do you know?'

His tone had been sharper than he'd intended.

Agent Logan glanced at him apprehensively. 'Ten weeks ago the NSA informed us that a low-level researcher of theirs, a neurologist, had gone AWOL. They gave us his name, his biometric data, and just asked us to keep an eye out, which we did as best we could.'

'Neil? But—'

'You thought he worked at Bethesda.' Sam shook her head.

Thomas had been about to say that Neil was far more than a low-level researcher. 'Bethesda was just his cover?'

'Bingo. So anyway, since the matter had been pitched as a potential espionage problem—and a low priority one at that, the case was given to the Counterintelligence Division. A week afterward, the Criminal Investigative Division caught a break in the Theodoros Gyges abduction… Did you ever hear about that?'

'Not much.' Thomas did know about Gyges—everyone did. In his short-lived activist days, Thomas had actually organized a boycott of one of the guy's New Jersey Target stores. 'Just the Post headline,' he said. '"Brain-damaged Billionaire," or something like that.'

'Exactly. Missing for two weeks, then he just pops up in Jersey, his head wrapped in bandages. Aside from some disorientation, he seems perfectly fine, until, that is, he's reunited with his wife.'

'What happened?'

'He doesn't recognize her. He remembers her, and everything else, perfectly, but he can't recognize her. According to the report, he demands that she stop impersonating his wife's voice, and when she continues pleading—she is his wife, after all—he freaks out and hospitalizes her. Big mess. The media would have loved it if their plates weren't already so full.

'So they run some tests, and it turns out that Gyges can't recognize any faces, not even his own. Creepy stuff.'

'Sounds like some kind of prosopagnosia,' Thomas said. Face blindness had been known since antiquity, but it wasn't until the nineties that damage to the fusiform face area in the visual cortex was identified as the culprit. In his classes, Thomas regularly used it as an example of how the brain was a grab-bag of special purpose devices, not the monolithic soul machine that so many undergraduates assumed it to be. 'I'd like to see the file.'

She flashed him a triumphant grin. 'Welcome to the good guys, professor.' As though unable to repress herself, she reached out to bop her fist against his.

'Anyway,' Sam continued, 'a couple of weeks ago someone in the Counterintelligence Division—I have no idea who—reads about this in the New York Times, and immediately draws the connection to their missing neurologist, Neil Cassidy. They send someone up from Washington with Cassidy's picture—'