“She doesn’t have to know gate propagation in high-res temporal resolution, though that would be heaven,” he once said. “But she should know how many megabytes there are in her PC and what that means. If I have to explain it, then the sex is never very good.”

Hood was not clear on who the sex was not good for or why. He was glad he was not on the need-to-know list.

As it turned out, the cherubic-looking Stoll was not here to tinker with a new program. He said he had gotten a call from Bob Herbert. The intelligence chief told him he needed something very specific.

“Bob wants me to rig him a Hoover,” Stoll said in his joyless monotone. Excitement, whenever Stoll showed it, was in the speed his fingers moved on a keyboard. Right now he was typing very rapidly.

“Which is what?” Hood asked. He suddenly felt very sorry for any woman Stoll had ever met.

“A Hoover is a data vacuum,” Stoll replied. “Bob wants to use his wheelchair computer as a drop zone for an external source.”

“You mean we plug into Bob, and Bob plugs into something else,” Hood said. “He serves as a conduit that allows us to read the ‘something else.’ ”

“I couldn’t have said it better,” Stoll said.

“What is Bob planning to plug into?” Hood asked.

“Well, he called right before his chair was loaded into a helicopter, so he didn’t go into a whole lot of detail,” Stoll said. “Apparently, Bob’s going to try to get into Jervis Darling’s estate. He wants to jack into his phone system.”

“Why? I thought we already hacked the Darling phone records.”

“We did,” Stoll said. “If he’s using his own uplink for secure calls, they wouldn’t show up on his public records. But if Bob plugs in directly, he’s accessing the origin point of the calls. That will give him access to all the numbers in the telephone’s memory.”

“What if those numbers aren’t programmed in?” Hood asked.

“Most phones retain the information somewhere,” Stoll assured him. “The redial function usually stores ten to twenty numbers. It costs less to build a chip that eliminates numbers by attrition. They get scrolled from the system rather than erased. Most people don’t know that.”

“What about incoming calls?” Hood asked. “We need to ID them.”

“If Darling’s phone has caller ID or whatever the Australian equivalent is, those numbers will also be stored,” Stoll said. “If he doesn’t, we’ll have to settle for the outgoing calls.”

“Did Bob say how he intended to get access to Darling’s private line?” Hood asked.

“For the record, it’s not the line he needs to get access to,” Stoll said. “It’s the phone itself. Bob can’t just splice into the fiber optics. That would put him outside the scrambler. Any data he got would be useless.”