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grinned. “There are very few things a man can count on in this life, but Abednego’s love of cheese is one.”
    “Boy, are you good with non-answers!”
    Ford gestured for her to sit down at the kitchen table, then started a potof coffee brewing. “I spoke to the people I work with—yeah, I said work, not worked—and I’ve got permission to tell you whatever you need to know. But I think you’ve already put a few things together.”
    “I know you haven’t always been a pastor and that you have experience in code breaking,” she said, remembering a case he’d helped her with in the past. Justine had done an unofficial backgroundcheck on him back then and had discovered that Ford had more security clearance than both of them put together.
    When Justine had tried to dig deeper, her computer screen had flashed an “access denied” warning, followed by a blank blue screen.
    A week later, Ford had warned Ella about being too curious and encouraged her to talk to him directly. He’d promised to answer what he could—which hadturned out to be darned little.
    “It’s been a while since I’ve worked for the government—the FBI actually—but I’m doing classified work for the Bureau again, this time on a contract basis,” Ford said. “Before I became a minister, my Bureau cover was that of an analyst working on scams and crimes involving Native American casinos.”
    “If that was your cover, what was your real job?”
    “I was analyzingall forms of communications coming from, and passing to, foreign nationals—suspected terrorists—living inside the US. I was based in various tribal offices—away from Washington and prying eyes and ears, even the innocent kind.”
    This was the kind of directness that had initially drawn her to Ford, and she was glad to be getting the real story at long last.
    “I hadn’t done that kind of work inyears. Then a few weeks ago, I was contacted again,” he continued. “They’d picked up messages in one of their big data-mining operations that suggested terrorists were planning to take some action against our nuclear power plant here on the Rez. They wanted me to identify all the players involved and thought my work as pastor would be the perfect cover. The basic problem is that
Tsétaak’á
GeneratingStation has received too much attention, being the first of its kind in the US.”
    “It’s the first new commercial reactor of
any
kind in this country in around thirty years.” The Navajo tribe had named it
Tsétaak’á
, Hogback, after the prominent rock formationclose to the site.
“Specifically
, what did the Bureau want you to do?”
    “The FBI asked me to monitor all communications to and from a localNavajo professor at the community college, Dr. Jane Lee.”
    “What tipped them off to her?” Ella asked, wondering why her department—at least Big Ed Atcitty, her boss—hadn’t been alerted. Homeland Security, for one, supposedly encouraged interagency communications and information sharing. Yet Dr. Lee, at the moment, was just a name she’d heard before, nothing more.
    “They’d been watching Dr. Leebecause of her ties to old anti-nuke activities, in and out of state. She’s also got a record of arrests at several of those demonstrations.”
    “Along with maybe a hundred other activists, I imagine.”
    “There’s more. She subscribed to one of those Internet services that’s supposed to create a virtual link between her computer and the company’s proxy servers. Theoretically, that makes any e-mailsshe sends out anonymous. The service is called Kloset. Only the company itself knows who you are and where you’ve been.”
    “Kloset—and the Feds?”
    “Yeah. They have some people on the inside, naturally, looking for this very thing. And for a very brief time, Dr. Lee corresponded with someone—still unidentified—and they discussed ‘taking out’ the Hogback reactor, ‘one way or the other,’ ” Ford said,emphasizing the words. “But now