Agent Atta pulled out her handcuffs.

'Tell me honestly, Agent Atta,' Thomas said quickly. 'If the Feds were after someone you loved, how quickly would you roll over?'

The question seemed to catch her off guard. She glanced nervously at Sam.

'Careful,' Heaney said. 'It could be a Jedi mind trick.'

'What do you think, Samantha?' Atta asked.

The sudden, irrational fear that Agent Atta was about to execute him seized Thomas. Gun-gun-real-gun! reeled through his panicked thoughts.

'I think we need him,' Sam said hastily. 'He knows what Cassidy's doing, Shelley. And he thinks he knows why. He's given us a motive—a real motive, for Christ's sake.'

'A motive?'

'Better than anything those NCAVC jokers have come up with. Better by far.'

Atta's large, chocolate eyes lingered on Thomas for a moment. 'Speak,' she said.

'It's a long story,' Thomas replied.

Atta holstered her Glock. 'Then you ride with me,' she said.

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

August 17th, 7.01 p.m.

Thomas felt a flare of embarrassment when he saw the vehicles congregated in front of his house: two Peekskill cruisers, a couple of unmarked cars, and a black van probably belonging to the Evidence Response Unit. Flashing lights splashed comic-book colors across the white siding. Contrails roped the sky above, fading into violet fans as night tightened its grip. They had driven to the very edge of daylight.

Shelley ran her car onto his lawn and pulled it into park. 'Look, professor, you're not out of the woods yet,' she said, staring at him intently. 'As it stands, we could charge you with obstruction, harboring a fugitive, maybe even accessory after the fact. You're too smart to think we'd nail you, but you're also too smart not to know how these things go. Anything can happen.'

'Don't bother with th—'

'Hear me out,' Atta interrupted. 'Now you've taken responsibility for your foolishness—which is a rare thing in this business. I've dealt with so many assholes that I sometimes feel more like a proctologist than special agent. You're not an asshole… I can see that.'

'So you believe me?' Thomas had spent most of the drive giving her an abbreviated account of what he'd told Sam earlier, about Skeat's class in Princeton, about the Argument—and of course, Nora. The entire time Atta had simply stared at the road, only rarely glancing at him to let him know she listened. Otherwise, he felt as though he were arguing the virtues of water to a stone.

'I believe yours is the most plausible interpretation of this madness I've heard. Don't get me wrong. I think all that stuff about the semantic apocalypse is bullshit, plain and simple. But the question is one of whether Cassidy believes it.'

'You'd make a good psychologist, Agent Atta.'