“Lincoln really is fine. If you’re going to detain us at least use my first name.”

“Detain?” He seemed genuinely confused. “Why would we detain you?”

“Because we handed Mike Hill over to Dante Spiro for trial here without a fight.”

“Oh, that. We’ll let him float in the soup here for five to ten years. You knew we couldn’t bring a case on the terrorism charges. Since we don’t exist. Dante’ll get justice enough for both countries. Damn smart, charging Hill for the explosives only. You have a hand in that?”

Rhyme’s expression: Don’t know what you mean.

Mulbry continued, “As for his buddy, the senator from Texas?”

Sachs asked, “You’re aware of him?”

Mulbry settled for a sardonic smile. “Some folks in Washington’ll take him out to the woodshed on the QT. Y’all might appreciate this: I had a thought last night: Compared with Mike Hill, Stefan Merck was the saner of the two. More interesting too. I’ll tell you, I’d have a beer with that fellow. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, what exactly am I doing here?”

The interior of the van was hot and getting hotter, with the full-on sun taxing the lethargic AC. Mulbry dried his brow yet again. “Want to hear a story? You know that years ago CIA technical services tried to build a fake dragonfly? It’s in the museum at Langley. It’s quite something. A work of art. Equipped with an early miniature video camera, an audio system, a flight mechanism that was revolutionary for the time. And guess what? It didn’t work worth squat. The least headwind would send it all over the landscape. But a few years later, the inspiration behind those dragonflies gave us drones. S’all about refinement. Story of life.

“Now, you could say that the AIS is an attempt to build a dragonfly. The Composer project would have worked pretty well. Except for one thing.”

“A headwind.”

“Exactly! And that’d be you and Detective Sachs. I’ll say—this isn’t flattery—not many people could have figured out the story we’d put together, the musical kidnapper and all.”

Not many? Rhyme thought.

“When you raided Charlotte’s home, you explained how you figured it all out.” A big grin. “We were listening, sure.”

Rhyme tipped his head.

“Impressive, Lincoln, Amelia. And hearing you—how you figured out the plan—I got myself an idea.”

“Your dragonfly molting into a drone.”

“I like that. So. In the world of intelligence gathering, there’s HUMINT—that’s info from people, assets on the ground. Then there’re satellites, computer hacking, wiretapping and video surveillance. That’s signals and electronic intelligence. SIGINT, ELINT. But until you took down our dragonfly, Lincoln, it never occurred to me how much intelligence we might learn from…evidence. Forensic evidence.”

“Really?”

“Oh, we have teams we use, or borrow the Bureau’s or army’s or somebody’s. But it’s usually after the fact, when an op goes bad. Get fingerprints or blast signatures or handwriting. We don’t use forensic investigation…”

Please don’t say proactively.

“…proactively. The way you analyze evidence, it’s like it talks to you.”