She turned away from the flat-screen. “Go ahead.”

“You ever free for a drink?”

“You don’t give up, do you?” Connolly said.

He pointed at the ripped motivational poster on the wall. “Persistence,” he said with a sheepish smile.

As Connolly approached her cubicle, she saw from a distance that a man was sitting in her chair. Another man was standing next to him.

The man in the chair was Emmett Kalmbach. The man standing beside him was tall and wiry, with horn-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline. She had no idea who he was.

Then the standing man noticed her, muttered something, and Kalmbach turned slowly around.

“Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, getting to his feet. “Allow me to introduce Richard Chambers from DHS.”

She shook hands with the man in the horn-rimmed glasses. His handshake was cold and limp.

“Dick Chambers,” the man said. He didn’t smile.

“M. T. Connolly.”

“Dick is a Regional Director of Homeland Security,” Kalmbach said.

“A pleasure to meet you.” Connolly kept her tone and face neutral, as if she’d never heard of him. But in fact she had. His background was almost clichéd diplomatic track: Yale, OCS, and then State Department. He’d been posted to some of the worst hotspots in the world. After September 11, he’d gone to Homeland Security, resolved that no terrorist would ever show his face in the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. Chambers wasn’t popular among the feds—an abrasive façade over an ego that wouldn’t quit—but he was a man who took on fires that nobody else wanted to go near. And, without any hesitation to risk his own hide, he got them extinguished. That he was involved made her uneasy. Real uneasy. “Now will someone explain to me what’s going on?” she asked.

“We can talk in the conference room,” Kalmbach said.

“Agent Connolly,” the man from Homeland Security said, “we seem to have a communications problem that I hope we can all work out in person.” He’d taken a seat at the head of the mahogany conference table, wordlessly indicating his place in the hierarchy.

“What sort of ‘communication problem’?” she asked.

“Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, “what happened at Dulles Airport falls cleanly within the jurisdiction of the Virginia police. I thought I made it clear that the situation there is of no concern to the Bureau.”

That wasn’t what he’d said, of course. He seemed to be performing for the man from DHS. But she knew better than to argue with Emmett Kalmbach over what he had or had not told her.

“Actually,” Connolly said, holding up the CD that Bruce Ardsley had made for her, “I think it’s very much of concern to the Bureau. Our own facial-recognition software has identified two Serbian war criminals who’ve entered the country illegally, one of them using a false British passport under the name—”