Thomas smiled, cataloguing—as much out of habit as anything else—the various identity claims and behavioral residues that every workspace sported. The things that said I belong to this; this is what I do. Nothing surprised him, except, perhaps, the blue-headed pins arranged in the shape of a heart on her tackboard. He nodded to a NY Rangers cap hanging from a tack. 'You a fan?'

'Fucking A,' she said, settling into her chair. She cracked her knuckles, then began tapping at her keyboard. 'You?' she asked.

'Too much heartbreak.'

'One of those, are you?'

'One of those who?'

Sam sorted through a succession of bright windows on her flat screen. 'One of those who think games are about winning.'

'I guess I—'

'Here it is,' Sam interrupted. 'Neil Cassidy's brain.'

The screen was tiled with neural cross-sections, day-glo colored and shaped like chestnuts. For an instant, it seemed impossible that these images could be in any way related to his best friend, let alone to what he had seen on the BD earlier this morning. They seemed too abstract, too clinical, to be the engine of today's events.

But they were.

'According to the appended assessment,' Sam said, 'there's nothing to suggest that Cassidy is missing shame or guilt circuits. He's definitely not a garden variety psychopath, whatever he is.'

But Thomas already knew this. Neil lacked the behavior crucial to psychopathy, or to antisocial personality disorder more generally. He and Neil had been close for a long time, and as good as psychopaths were at bluffing conscience in the short term, they always showed the heartlessness of their hand sooner or later.

'Scary smart though,' Sam added. 'You want me to print these files up for you?'

'Please,' Thomas said. He felt numb. Meeting the FBI was one thing, but coming here, walking the halls of the bureau, was altogether different. It reminded him that it was an institution he was dealing with, with all the perils and pitfalls that represented. You could generally depend on individuals to be rational, but an organization? Especially one as enormous as the FBI. No matter how reasonable the decisions made at this or that labyrinthine juncture, the sorry fact was that you simply could not trust them to add up to anything sane.

'How did you get these?' he asked as the first pages began slipping from the laser printer.

'From the NSA.'

Speaking of monstrous institutions.

'And how did they get them?'

'Low-fields are pretty much part of any government biometric scan, nowadays, especially at sensitive locations.' She shot him her peculiar but endearing slanted smile. 'Would you like to see yours?

'You gotta be kidding me.'