Nimec studied the woman intently. Though the room’s fluorescents were dimmed, there was sufficient ambient light coming in from the windows to reveal her features without any sort of computer enhancements. In fact, a still image had already been extracted from the video footage and was being cross-indexed with Sword’s file of known and suspected international terrorists.

“You could have knocked,” Roma said through compact Audix speakers. At this point only the back of his head was visible.

“Yes. 1 could have.” Shutting the door.

“There’s a light switch on the wall ...”

“Bounce it to where it’s been giving us trouble,” Barnhart said, watching.

“Sure,” Jeff said. His finger stabbed a button with the double-arrow fast-forward symbol on it. “Though I personally get a charge out of the suggestive dialogue during the buildup—clichéd as it may be.”

The video zipped ahead.

Grolin hit Play again.

Now the woman was much closer to the desk, her coat partially unbuttoned, unmistakable desire in her expression.

“Why are you here?” Roma said, and then paused. His voice had become husky, dropping to a near whisper.

“Right. Like he’s really that clueless,” Grolin commented. “The guy’s choking on his own drool—”

“Shhh, this is it,” Noriko said.

“Yno... zrrywn’t ... hvyrrpstl... mrrow ... pssed ... syight.”

“It’s still nothing but gobbledygook,” Barnhart said.

“That’s because I haven’t worked my electronic wizardry yet.” Grolin froze the image, then shifted his hands to a smaller console which consisted of more dials and pitch slides, as well as a dozen or so keys the size of the Tab button on a standard computer keyboard.

As his fingers clicked over the keys, a tool bar appeared across the top of the screen and the video image shrank into a window, with graphical level meters and editing controls appearing to its right.

“Now, let’s try it again, giving it a little mid-range gain, eliminating some audio dither.”

Grolin hit Rewind, Pause, then Play.

“Why are you here?” Roma said from the speakers. Paused.

Grolin quickly tweaked a dial, and then another, his eyes narrow behind the intentionally nerdish horn-rimmed glasses.

Roma said, “You know ... zarry ... wnnt have your parrrrrsrdy until tomorrow—”

Grolin stopped the progress of the virtual image, ran it backward to the point just before Roma’s voice dropped off in volume, started it going forward again.

His fingers clattered over the buttons of his console. Graph lines and status bars rose and fell in the edit window.

“Why are you here?” Roma husked. “You know zakrry won’t have your papers rdy until tomorrow. And 1 don’t suppose you’ve just come to syngnnnight.”

“You hear that?” Barnhart jerked his head around toward Nimec, wincing in pain from the abrupt movement. “He’s talking about providing her with papers. Presumably travel documents.”

“I’ll bet,” Nimec said. “That son of a bitch facilitated the attack from beginning to end.”