The bar where they were to meet Dr Mackenzie was just off K Street, not far from Georgetown University, in a neighborhood planners would have called 'medium density mixed residential and commercial'. Thomas could smell the Potomac gnawing on tin and granite when he stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Sam gave him a hasty briefing as they walked up to the bar. Thomas could tell she was angry at herself for not doing so earlier; he could sense a gestalt shift in her attitude toward him, as though she were remembering some promise she had made to herself. Suddenly she was brisk and professional, if a little harried. Even so, she found time to answer a panhandler's upraised palm—one of those bums straight out of the old movies, all stained whiskers and clothes leathered with grime. Once again, Thomas waited on the guilty sidelines while she pawed through her purse. She ended up giving the old man a five, pinching the corner of the bill as though she were feeding something with teeth that snapped.

Dr Mackenzie, she explained with mnemonic intensity, was 68, an employee of the NSA for sixteen years, a widower for eight. He had a reputation for brilliance, though oddly enough, he had no publications whatsoever. She cast him a lingering look as they trotted up the steps to make sure, Thomas supposed, he had absorbed the significance of that last tidbit.

'Remember,' she said, 'try to read between the lines.'

Thomas smiled despite the lump in his throat. Why was he anxious all of a sudden? He almost felt like one of Neil's newly jilted lovers about to confront the first ex-wife. Neil, Thomas realized, had likely betrayed Mackenzie every bit as profoundly as he had betrayed him.

Thomas recognized the man the instant they stepped into the pub-worn interior. The place had a quaint teahouse atmosphere that not only belied its name, Blowhards, but all the telltale signs of hardcore barroom crowds: the cracked panes of glass, the carved initials distressing the already 'distressed' decor, and the smell of spilled booze and—oddly enough—cigar smoke. In theory-speak he would have said that its identity-claims contradicted its behavioral residue. In normal speak he would have said that it looked like a place where the high and mighty got down and dirty.

Mackenzie sat in a high-backed stall to their right, pondering his palmtop. He looked like a bald, diminutive grandfather, someone who should be wearing overalls rather than a lobbyist's slick K Street attire, a black pinstriped Armani by the look of it, with a hint of zoot in the cut of the jacket. When he spotted them, his face fairly exploded with affable good humor.

'Good-good!' he cried. 'I was getting worried I'd confused the times.'

He seemed a very happy ex-wife.