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will-call window. But Nash was nowhere in sight. She’d been scanning the place for the last half hour, looking for him. She saw many military types walking around and politicians everywhere and lobbyists
cluttering up the expensive boxes below. But so far, no Captain Nash.
    The people around her were the loudest and the drunkest in the arena. She was becoming uneasier by the minute. This would be the third time that Nash had stood her up. She realized he had a high-level job—he was attached to the National Security Council. He never missed a chance to tell her that. But she had an important job, too. And he knew all about it. And after two months she felt she deserved better from him than stranding her here in the Jerry Springer section.
    Li was Asian-American and very attractive. Nice hair, nice face. Nice everything. Even dressed in simple jeans and a bland top, she could feel many of her boozy neighbors locking in on her. It was not a pleasant feeling, though. She’d always been uncertain about her looks, never seeing what others saw. One of her ex-boyfriends once told her, You’re too good-looking; that’s the problem. She’d even been approached by Playboy to pose for a pictorial, “Secretaries of the Pentagon.” The offer both amused and horrified her. Even in her best moments, she tried not to think about it.
    Appearing in Playboy was something Li could never do even if she wanted to. She worked at the Pentagon; that much was true. And she went to the typing pool every morning and picked up piles of documents to be word-processed. But she was not a secretary. That was her cover. Actually, she worked for one of the most secret operations within the U.S. government. It was called the Defense Security Agency.
    Created after September 11th, the DSA’s mission was deceptively simple: “Maintain security within the ranks of the U.S. military.” Truth was, the cryptic agency played many roles. It sniffed out members of the U.S. military who might be terrorist agents in disguise—it had caught several in the past three years. It investigated unresolved disappearances of U.S. military weapons, from bullets to bombers. It watched over the Pentagon’s online security systems and its communications networks, another line of defense against would-be terro-hackers. It even monitored the Pentagon’s bank accounts, looking for any irregularities.

    The DSA was so classified, it was all but unknown to the other U.S. intelligence services. Even the Vice President was said to be unaware of its existence, as were 99.9 percent of the people who worked in the Pentagon. It was a secret unit hiding in plain sight.
    It was also a very small operation. Three people assigned here in D.C., just a half-dozen more serving overseas. Modest though it was, the DSA could throw some weight around. Not only did it have unfettered access to all intelligence gathered by every other U.S. spy agency, but it could also call on any number of U.S. special ops units to do its dirty work. It took its orders directly from the NSC and no one else. These days that was like getting the Word directly from God.
    As she was the daughter of a career military man—her father was a colonel in the Marines—and just eight months out of grad school at Georgetown, working for the DSA would have seemed the ideal job for Li. Though she was also a talented artist, her real talents lay in the newly birthed science of counterterrorism, and the DSA was certainly on the front lines for that. But lately, she felt more like the lookout on the Titanic , with the iceberg dead ahead. Many things were out of control in D.C. these days security-wise. Things she wished she knew nothing about.
    This was another reason she was feeling unsettled tonight. The terrorist chatter lately was not good; she knew this because she had access to every byte of information coming into the Pentagon about every known terrorist group around the