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her?"
    Not since she'd told him to piss off.
    "Nope."
    Carrie sliced thoughtfully into the bland-looking vegetarian dish she'd ordered and looked around the cavernous room. "Couldn't we have just eaten at your place? This is creepy."
    "What is?"
    "What do you mean, 'What is?' The fact that any minute now, some fanatic could just blow us to pieces."
    "I doubt anyone would waste a rocket on a mid-priced Italian restaurant in Phoenix."
    "But you don't know that. You don't know for sure." Beamon shrugged. There was just no goddamn way he was going to let some Middle Eastern fruitcake with a piece-of-shit surplus rocket launcher keep him from doing exactly what he wanted to. "Thousands of people die getting run over by drunk drivers every year, and all anyone ever worries about is terrorists and plane crashes. You have a better statistical chance of being killed by a shark in your hot tub."
    "I know it's irrational, but it's hard to help, Mark. The fact that something could come out of nowhere . . . One minute you're just working or talking about nothing with a friend, and the next you're dead. I guess it's like snakes. Most are harmless but . . ." She shuddered.
    The image of the World Trade Center flashed briefly across his mind. He blinked hard and watched Carrie as she popped something that might have been eggplant into her mouth. What if she had been in it when it had collapsed?
    After twenty-odd years in the FBI, it was easy--critical to what was left of his sanity, really--that he view crime as clinically and dispassionately as possible. But what if she had died that day in September? What if she had been taken from him just because a bunch of semiliterate Muslims decided God was angry.
    "You still there, Mark? What are you thinking about?" "Nothing."
    He ran a finger absently along the edge of his plate as she continued to eat. They'd been together for what seemed like a long time now--easily the longest relationship of his adult life, if he optimistically assumed that they still had a relationship.
    The year before, when he'd become the target of the FBI and Congress, he'd made the monumental mistake of dumping her. He'd done it with the best intentions: He loved her and he didn't want to drag her and her young daughter down with him. She hadn't seen it that way, though. What she'd seen was a lack of trust--a lack of commitment. And maybe there was some truth to that. Or maybe he'd just wanted to cut loose of everything. With the benefit of hindsight, though, that breakup had positioned itself firmly at number one on the rather long list of dumb things he'd done in his life.
    So now, despite a fairly obscene amount of groveling on his part, they'd "slowed things down." That's what women said when they were on the fence as to whether or not you were a complete loser: "I think we should slow things down."
    There was still hope, though. The necklace he'd given her as a peace offering was dangling from her neck. It shone in the candlelight like . . . well, not like forgiveness, but maybe like the distant possibility of forgiveness.
    "What's happening with the inspection?" Carrie said, dabbing at her mouth with her napkin. "You haven't said a word about it all night. Is it over?"
    An interesting choice of words.
    "Just about."
    "And?"
    Beamon quoted a line from the report that pretty much summed it up. "'While the office has been effective, this has been despite the management and administration, not because of it.'"
    "That seems unfair."
    Beamon blew air from his nose in an audible rush. Not quite a laugh. "I guess it is, in a way. It should have been worse. The kid running the inspection seems to think I'm a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Jesus Christ. He softened the blow."
    Finally spotting their waitress standing by a window, searching for terrorists, Beamon drained his beer and motioned for a refill. "Kind of a strange position to be in. Every time I turn around these days, politics are working for me instead of