“Stanley,” she said. “Oh, Stanley.” She got up, he thought, to get more wine, but she took his glass and knelt on the floor in front of him, and placed both of his hands in hers. It was now impossible to see his shoes. He tried to look at her hair, a place on a woman he usually chose to study in such close quarters. She let him do that and said, “I love you. And if the world had an honest deity, you’d be its best king.”

Vera was bugging about Armedia. It had an office in Virginia, in the suburb called Vienna. It was a company that specialized in content management and content-related solutions. She wanted to stick her eyes with pins when she read such words. But Washington wasn’t East Knoxville. Facts didn’t come in screen doors and walking sticks. They came in encaustic—so gunked with wax jargon and government pigment you couldn’t even guess what was underneath. Armedia’s mission is to provide world-class solutions for clients to automate the creation, capture, organization and presentation of their intellectual assets, a press release said. “Capture” was the best word in that bunch.

She’d found out that Armedia had a contract with MECS. She’d gotten a copy of the contract from a guy who’d made a consulting business out of keeping track of intelligence contracts. The address of MECS was the gold in the gravel of legalese. It was 2070 Chain Bridge Road, Vienna, Virginia. The next step was to get out there and see if she could buttonhole an employee or five in the parking lot.

Driving, always tricky for a city girl, went sour fast. Northern Virginia was the devil’s development zone. So much shopping and too little roadway made Vera take the Lord’s name. Buildings weren’t big on having numbers on them. Further, everyone already knew where everything was but couldn’t, when asked for directions, explain how to get there. She felt like tape-recording what instructions she did get; they were too jumbled with landmarks, too light on street names to jot down. Worst of all, she often couldn’t make a simple right or left; she had to get in the proper lane, which usually managed to be five lanes away. So she was forever passing the turn and looking harder to make a U-turn. St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, couldn’t lift her. U-turn was miles ahead, and the traffic to it had a glowworm pace. She would have been better off walking, but that was no go, because sidewalks had gone endangered. The population of parking garages was fine. She found them all too often before she found her way home. Sometimes she just sat in a space to get calm.