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for nearly four hours before anyone realized he wasn’t asleep in his bedroom.
    It was a tough old world.

 
    2
    ASHLEY BORDEN HATED the runaround she figured she’d been getting ever since she was a kid and had discovered that boys and girls were different. It wasn’t just the differences in how they went to the bathroom; she’d figured that out when she was five and had taken down her pants behind the garage at home in Fargo to show Harold Thompson hers, and he’d done the same, and when she’d laughed at him he’d knocked her down and ran off. But it was in school a couple of years later when kickball or baseball or football teams were called up, and only the boys were picked.
    It wasn’t fair, because she knew that she was just as fast and as strong as they were. Only it got worse in high school when boys were supposedly naturally better at math and science, and even worse in college at the University of Missouri in Columbia, which was ranked the number one school of journalism in the U.S. Girls as good-looking as Ashley were supposed to be working toward jobs as broadcast news readers and/or husbands heading to law school, not as print journalists.
    Pulling up just before six at the Dakota District south gate in her dusty Toyota Tacoma pickup after a very late start, the Bismarck Tribune magnetic logo on both doors, she was just about ready for a fight. At twenty-seven she was five-seven, slender, with light brown hair worn short, and wide dark eyes, still a little too tomboyish to be considered a beauty, with the cocky, sometimes even brash attitude of a service brat—the daughter of a two-star army general who’d raised her as a single father after her mother had died when she was seven. This afternoon she was dressed in jeans, a turtleneck fisherman’s sweater, and a dark blue parka, hood back.
    An air force cop, wearing winter BDUs, a sidearm on his hip, an M4 carbine slung over his shoulder, came out of the guardhouse and walked over as Ashley rolled down her window.
    â€œGood afternoon, ma’am, may I help you?” he asked. He was young, in his very early twenties, built like a linebacker. His name tape read: ANDERSON .
    Ashley held out her press pass. “I’ve come out to interview Dr. Lipton.”
    â€œNo one by that name here, ma’am,” the MP said.
    Whitney Lipton was one of the leading minds on microbe biology and the genetic manipulation of bacteria. She’d worked at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta until four years ago when the president had tapped her to lead the Clean Coal Research team for the Department of Energy. And she had disappeared from view.
    It was Washington politics and the name wouldn’t have meant anything to Ashley who’d come to Bismarck right out of J school and had never managed to leave because she’d had a life of moving and she was sick of it, but her dad was stationed at the Pentagon and whenever she could she’d pop out to visit him. Three years ago she’d flown to D.C. without calling first, meaning to surprise him for his birthday. As she was getting out of the cab in front of her father’s Fort McNair house, a fit-looking woman was just getting into the back of a plain Chevrolet Impala with government plates and their eyes met. The woman nodded and she was gone.
    Her father hadn’t been surprised that his daughter had shown up out of the blue; nothing about her surprised him. She gave him a peck on the cheek.
    â€œHi, Poppy,” she had said. “Who’s the lady I just met outside?”
    He’d laughed. “Is that a daughter’s or a reporter’s question?”
    Something had not quite set right with her. “Both.”
    â€œSorry, no romance there. She’s Whitney Lipton, an egghead over at the CDC. Could be doing something for us, and that’s all you’re going to get out of me.”
    â€œSo, happy birthday.”
    Ashley had