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he could never get out of his head no matter how much therapy, aversion training, hypnosis, and other, less savory forms of persuasion he underwent.
    Idly, his eyes traveled to a photograph that he kept on his desk. It was a picture of him and his parents taken in Rome shortly before Christmas 1985. It was one of the few things he had to remember them by, this fading old Polaroid of two beautiful people and a kid wearing an A. S. Roma football club cap, and carrying a couple of books his father had once given him…
    One of them was about old movies—his father was a great film buff—and the other was a beginner’s guide to ciphers and puzzles and games of logic for the child to read and stretch his brain. “Take these,” he said to the boy before going off to meet his colleague on that fateful day. “You’ll get a kick out of them someday.”
    He shook off his reverie and glanced at the phone, which stared back at him silently.
    Under normal circumstances, there would be no question of his getting involved. Hostage situations were almost always best left to the local police, or the FBI, unless the hostages were high-value targets. To Powers, hostage situations were just a step up from domestic-violence calls, the kind cops hated most, because there was very little upside, while the downside potential was huge. In the end, there was always a dead husband, a dead wife, or a dead cop. But this was different: these were kids. And he used to be a kid, once.
    Tom Powers rippled his fingers across multiple keyboards, calling up everything in the NSA/CSS arsenal: Echelon video feeds, RSS chatter sorters, real-time simultaneous translations of Internet café activity in China, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, key-word trigger-coded for instant relay. All conversations could be heard live or as downloaded audio, and read as saved transcriptions in both the original language and in English.
    He sampled a few, dipping in and out. He’d lost track of how many languages he spoke fluently, because when you started toting up you had to factor in dialects, subdialects, and even random bastardizations like Hawaiian pidgin and Marshallese. Nothing about what was happening in Edwardsville. Plenty of the usual stuff—angry but idle threats against the Great Satan, obscure religious and cultural diatribes, boastful European white supremacist rants, obscure American-sourced swagger—but nothing that stood out. No trip wires. And trip wires were his business.
    Nearly a decade after September 11, the American security apparatus had come a long way. Plenty of attacks had been foiled, some—especially early on, when al-Qaeda had the tactical advantage—particularly horrific. There was the Arab cell that had come down from Canada, trying to pass themselves off as American Indians on one of the upstate New York reservations while they waited for the activation codes on a low-yield nuclear device they had smuggled from the former Soviet Union to Halifax, financing the operation by bootlegging cigarettes from the reservation to the outside world and pocketing a fortune in tax avoidance.
    The good guys had lucked out on that one: an alert cop in Watertown had noticed the ink on the phony tax stamp rubbing off on his hand, and grabbed the “Indian,” who had led him to the other cell members. The cop was shot and killed during the rendezvous, but he had been smart enough to order backup and so the group was rounded up and sent to some especially nasty rendition prisons in Egypt and Slovakia. The cop’s widow got a handsome payout from the feds; he got buried at Arlington and the public was never the wiser.
    The phone stayed stubbornly silent. Just as well, probably.
    Tom Powers stood up and stepped out of the secure room. The rest of his house on North West Street was equally secure, although less dramatically, so he didn’t seal the room as he did when he left home.
    To