But to her, “Marion” was either a librarian or a housewife in a TV sitcom, and neither fit her self-image. She was a tomboy and proud of it. As tough as any boy, she had even beat up the seventh-grade class bully for daring to call her adored younger brother Wayne a “sissy.”

So she insisted on being called by her initials, which to her ears sounded tough and no-nonsense and the exact opposite of girly-girl. Maybe even a little enigmatic.

Over the years, she’d learned about makeup, and she’d developed a pretty damned nice figure, and she worked out every morning at five for at least an hour. When she wanted to look hot, she could. And she knew that when she put on that slinky red jersey halter dress from Banana Republic she always drew appreciative glances from men.

At work, though, she downplayed her femininity as much as possible. The FBI was still a boys’ club, and she was convinced that the guys took you a lot more seriously if you didn’t arouse their libidos.

Like the guy who sat across from her right now. His name was Bruce Ardsley, and he was a forensic video analyst with the Bureau’s Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit. The main FBI lab was in D.C., in the Hoover building, but they’d recently installed an outpost here because of all the demand on the Bureau since 9/11.

Ardsley wore thick aviator-frame glasses and had greasy hair and long bushy sideburns that might have been modish in the Swinging ‘70s, and he was notorious for trying to hit on all the female agents and administrative assistants. But he’d given up on her long ago. Now they got along fine.

His office, in the basement of the new resident agency building, was no bigger than a closet, jammed with steel shelves heaped with video monitors and digital editing decks and CPUs. Taped to one wall was a mangled poster of a man running up stadium steps. Above his blurred figure was the word PERSISTENCE. At his feet it said, “There is no GIANT step that does it. It’s a lot of LITTLE steps.”

She handed Ardsley two disks. “The one marked Dulles is from Dulles Airport,” Connolly said.

“Clever.”

She smiled. “The other has the photos from Warsaw.” As he promised, Padlo had emailed her photos of Agim Rugova’s henchmen. One of them was Dragan Stefanovic, the man Padlo thought might be the Dulles shooter who’d tried to kill Harold Middleton. Stefanovic had served under Agim Rugova, which made him a war criminal at the very least. After the war, Padlo said, he’d become a mercenary and had gone into hiding.

“High-def, I hope.”

“I doubt it,” she replied.