“They don’t need it: They’ve got suicide volunteers. But yeah, there are other bad guys who…if you can see it, so can the feds. Remember that feature about nuclear terrorism that Zeb ran last year? How the NIRT units and FEMA were able to track bombs as they come in across the frontier if there’s an alert on?”

“I don’t want to go there.” The thought made Miriam feel physically ill. “There is no way in hell I’d smuggle a nuclear weapon across a frontier.”

“No.” Paulette leaned forward, her eyes serious: “But if you have this ability, who else might have it? And what could they do with it? There are some very scary, dangerous national security implications here, and if you go public the feds will bury you so deep—”

“I said I don’t want to go there,” Miriam repeated. “Listen, this is getting deeply unfunny. You’re frightening me, Paulie, more than those assholes with their phone calls and their handle on the pharmaceutical industry. I’m wondering if maybe I should sleep with a gun under my pillow.”

“Get frightened fast, babe; it’s your ass we’re talking about. I’ve had two days to think about your vanishing trick and our goodfella problem, and I tell you, you’re still thinking like an honest journalist, not a paranoid. Listen, if you want to clean up, how about the crack trade? Or heroin? Go down to Florida, get the right connections, you could bring a small dinghy over and stash it on the other side, no problems—it’d just take you a while, a few trips maybe. Then you could carry fifty, a hundred kilos of coke. Sail it up the coast, then up the Charles. Bring it back over right in the middle of Cambridge, out of fucking nowhere without the DEA or the cops noticing. They say one in four big shipments gets intercepted—that’s bullshit—but maybe one in five, one in eight…you could smuggle the stuff right under their noses in the middle of a terrorist scare. And I don’t know whether you’d do that or not—my guess is not, you’ve got capital-P principles—but that is the first thing the cops will think of.”

“Hell.” Miriam stared into the bottom of her glass, privately aghast. “What do you suggest?”

Paulette put her own glass down. “Speaking as your legal adviser, I advise you to buy guns and move fast. Mail the disk to another newspaper and the local FBI office, then go on a long cruise while the storm breaks. That—and take a hammer to the locket and smash it up past recognition.”

Miriam shook her head, then winced. “Oh, my aching head. I demand a second opinion. Where is my recount, dammit?”