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true but it didn’t bother either of them.
    â€˜Maybe I should.’ He unloaded his plate of meat loaf and put both their empty trays on a nearby waiter stand. Coming back to the table but still standing, he said, ‘Well?’
    â€˜I’ve been through every legal hearing in which the agency’s been involved in remit transgressions, particularly under Nixon and Bush. As well as through all the textbook references I could locate. I couldn’t find anything that even came close to this. And hacking isn’t a crime, by our definition; that is what our remit is, entering other people’s communications without their knowledge or permission, although I’ve never considered myself working as part of a botnet.’
    Singleton began to eat. ‘I couldn’t find a definite legal bar, either. But it’s pretty well set out that NSA doesn’t perform field operations.’
    â€˜Jack covered that very specifically. Any fieldwork or humint retrieval is carried out by the CIA. And since 9/11 the courts have returned ambiguous rulings against us when we’ve been accused of wiretapping and bugging here at home, despite Signals Intelligence Directive 18 specifically prohibiting it without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillances Court.’
    â€˜Washington commandment handed down from Mount Sinai: “Nothing’s wrong or illegal until you’re caught doing it,”’ recited Singleton, quoting the in-house cynicism. ‘Don’t forget the 2013 uproar over our Prism Project precisely to monitor Facebook through Britain’s GCHQ, for which we gratefully handed over something like one hundred and fifty million dollars. What happens if there’s another whistle-blower like Edward Snowden?’
    â€˜There’ll be another uproar,’ accepted Marian drily, working her way through her salad.
    â€˜Can we belatedly object?’
    â€˜No,’ she said without hesitation.
    Singleton pushed his plate away, the meat loaf half-eaten. ‘According to our contract terms, we could simply withdraw. We didn’t know what we were doing during the initial period.’
    â€˜You mind taking that meat loaf away?’ said Marian, a vegetarian. ‘It smells disgusting.’
    â€˜Tasted disgusting, too.’ Singleton transferred the plate to the waiter stand. ‘I asked what you’re going to do.’
    Marian didn’t reply at once, chasing the last crouton around her dish. ‘I’m not sure where I’m safer, inside from where I’ll be able to assess the dangers and accusations before they’re made. Or outside, to plead ignorance when it all goes wrong.’
    â€˜I’m not sure a court would accept an ignorance plea. Or that ignorance is even a defence.’
    â€˜We’re staying in, aren’t we?’ accepted the woman, resigned.
    â€˜I guess.’
    â€˜But I’ll keep looking for something that gives it some legal justification.’
    â€˜So will I,’ said Singleton. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t have to come from our trial lawyers.’
    *   *   *
    James Bradley prided himself on covering all the bases, which he wasn’t able to do with Jack Irvine, and it unsettled him. His difficulty was in having to rely on records and written accounts of Irvine’s cryptographic brilliance, unsupported by any biographical material apart from the abbreviated account of the debacle surrounding Irvine’s ambassador father, which, realistically, he might have misinterpreted and didn’t have any relevance anyway.
    There were, of course, the obvious practical precautions such as the CIA surveillance he’d imposed upon Irvine and his Fort Meade team. Bradley looked up from the list of CIA internal-security officers he was forming to watch over Irvine and the operation, halted by a sudden doubt about Harry Packer’s reliability. Shouldn’t Packer be