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was good with computers.
    He supposed that that was why Khalid had approached him two days ago.
    Finding no one in the living room, he continued through to the kitchen. The men were waiting for him there.
    "What are you--," he began, but stopped when the two men pointed handguns squarely at his face.
    "Shut up, you," one of the gunmen said in heavily accented English. He pointed at one of the white-painted kitchen chairs beside the table. "Sit down. Someone wants to talk to you."
    Trembling, Ghailiani did as he was told.

Chapter 2
    Atlantis Queen passenger terminal Southampton, England Thursday, 1315 hours GMT
    "i don't like it," dean said.
    "You're not being paid to like it," the voice of William Rubens whispered in Dean's ear. "It's necessary."
    "Oh, yes. Necessary. And all in the sacred and most holy name of national security."
    "Are you having a problem with this op, Mr. Dean?" Rubens asked. "Something personal!"
    Rubens was the head of Desk Three, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, and Dean's boss. A tiny microphone and bone-conducting speaker surgically implanted behind Dean's left ear picked up his own voice-- which could be pitched just above a sub-vocalized murmur and still be clearly heard back at the Art Room, the black chamber beneath NSA headquarters that ran Desk Three operations--and played Rubens' replies in his head. The antenna and power supply that gave Dean a direct satellite comm link back to Fort Meade, Maryland, and the headquarters of the NSA was coiled up in his belt. His handlers in the Art Room had been able to listen in on his entire conversation with Mitchell, Llewellyn, and Lockwood.
    The strip of plastic he'd left in the Security Office, however, was a bit more sophisticated.
    "No, sir," Dean told Rubens. "Nothing that will affect the mission, anyway. But I don't like spying on an ally, and I don't like spying on ordinary people."
    It was after lunch, now, and Dean was sitting on one of the plastic couches in the main waiting area just outside of the security checkpoint, a laptop computer open in front of him. Several hundred people, most in casual tourist dress, sat elsewhere on the concourse, gathered in small groups talking, or were lining up to go through the checkpoint. He stared at the laptop's screen, his lips moving slightly as he continued to speak with Rubens three thousand miles away.
    "Okay. This should do it." Dean pressed the return key on his laptop. "Initiating. Are you getting the signal?"
    "Wait a second."
    There was a long pause. Transatlantic encrypted transmissions had been more and more uncertain of late. Communication satellite coverage wasn't as good these days as it had been ten years earlier, thanks to an aging infrastructure and some serious budget cuts. Even the NSA, with the largest budget of any branch of the U. S. intelligence community, had been feeling the bite lately.
    "Okay," Rubens' voice said. "We've got it."
    Dean was seated only a couple of hundred feet from the upstairs room housing the backscatter X-ray security system, a deliberate positioning that kept him inside the range of the sophisticated surveillance device with which he was working. Inside his laptop case was a black plastic box with two long power cords--apparently an AC adapter for the computer. Although it could serve as an adapter, most of the space inside the box was taken up by a unit that could transmit low-power signals to the microcircuitry embedded within the piece of tape Dean had left in the security office, initiating an information dump. The batteries were disguised as screws in the casing, while the coiled-up power cords served as an antenna. Dean's laptop, in turn, took the incoming data and boosted it along, via satellite, to Fort Meade.
    The plastic strip adhering to the back of the computer console upstairs included a microphone only a little thicker than a human hair, and a simple-minded computer chip that could store a few seconds' worth of incoming sounds, then