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would think taking on
the president is something more typical of a seasoned professional,
wouldn’t you? So let’s cut the bullshit, Kosmalski.”
    Kosmalski shrugged. “Our profiler seems to think the perp
simply used the woman to extract what he wanted from Ahmadi—”
    “If that were truly the case, I assure you that the
murderer did not know Mohammad Ahmadi.’
    “They must’ve known each other well enough for Ahmadi to
buzz him into the building.”
    “How do you know it wasn’t Prouty who admitted him?” McBurney
looked into Kosmalski’s face—must have been a Marine, probably a sergeant, he
thought, having spent enough time in the Navy to know a Marine when he saw one.
“Just show me what I need to see and I’ll get out of your hair.”
    Agent Kosmalski, whose head was shaved, regarded him a
moment before turning toward someone in the dining room. “Track down Agent
Mueller, would you?”
    Back in the living room a tall and very young-looking FBI
agent presented McBurney with a single sheet of paper sheathed inside
protective plastic marked as evidence. There were dozens of series of numbers
that nearly filled the page.
    McBurney looked up, confused.
    Agent Jeffrey Mueller said, “A few of us agents started an
astronomy club a little while ago. Are you familiar with satellite epoch data?”
    “Vaguely.”
    “Mr. Kosmalski and I ran this page by a friend of mine in
the lab, and he immediately confirmed what it was.” Mueller went on to remind
McBurney what he pretty much already knew about satellite ‘epoch’ data, that by
applying the time and position of satellite insertion into orbit, along with
the defining Keplerian values, one could approximate the satellite’s orbital
location in the future, providing the orbit wasn’t subsequently altered or
‘retasked.’
    “I get the picture,” said McBurney. “I don’t get what
interest the Agency has in amateur astronomy.”
    Mueller looked to his boss. Kosmalski said to McBurney,
“Some of those dates seem to be launch dates— future launch dates. I
understand they might be considered important.”
    McBurney saw some dates were indeed in the future, toward
the end of July. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck...
    Kosmalski asked, “This is your ‘purview,’ is it not?”
    McBurney knew that the dates revealed on the page were
highly classified by the Pentagon. Nonetheless, he would have thought them
worthless in the hands of an ordinary terrorist. “Have you been advised as to
the significance of these dates?”
    “Not specifically.” Kosmalski turned toward his junior
colleague. “That’ll be all, Mueller.”
    “Hold on,” interrupted McBurney. “What else did you find
here? I mean, are we to presume the murderer was after this?”
    “That’s inconclusive,” said Kosmalski. “Whatever the motive
at work here, you have to say it was important enough for the perp to run
roughshod over not just our sensitivities but also Iran’s. Look how their guy’s
left here, you know, strapped to some naked infidel whore.”
    “I don’t think that excludes Tehran from the list of
probable suspects.”
    “Go on, Mueller, tell him what else you found.”
    “Well, let’s see. There’s a stack of US currency banded to
two passports amounting to several thousand dollars worth of hundred dollar
bills...” Mueller said that the passports, one Turkish and the other Italian,
were both issued in March of the previous year. Each bore the photograph of a
clean-shaven version of the man presently being picked over in the other room. There
was a thick stack of handwritten notes in Farsi and several dozen of the
typical reports documenting some of Ahmadi’s contacts with key Americans. They
had also found a rolled-up map of the northeastern United States and a copy of
the Koran.
    As a former employee of a diplomatic mission, McBurney
thought the list sounded incomplete. “How about encrypted communications
protocols, stuff he might’ve