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tight right turn. Steve found himself thrown up against her and scrambled to move away. She said. “Seat belts are an essential safety item. I suggest you make a habit of wearing yours or you could find yourself in danger.”
    He wasn’t certain if the “danger” Ace was referring to would come from an accident or from ever touching the driver again, but in either case, a seatbelt seemed like a good idea. Just as Steve had reached back and pulled down the harness, the car whipped into a parking space outside one of the single-story dull-green 1940-era wooden buildings that seemed to alternate with futuristic architecture in Fort Meade. Ace pulled the cap back over her head and got out of the car.
    Having just clicked the seat belt closed, Steve opened it again and followed.
    He was sure he saw a smile this time.

CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    There were two marines in full combat gear at the front door. Steve could feel their eyes behind their mirrored ballistic sunglasses as they ruminated on the question of killing him immediately or waiting until he presented just a bit more of a threat. Ace showed them a blizzard of passes, IDs, and papers covered with stamps and signatures that she pulled from an apparently inexhaustible supply in one of her leg pockets. Finally, one of them must have worked because both guards stiffened slightly, saluted, and waved them through.
    As he walked by, Steve imagined that they looked slightly disappointed, but he decided that they could always kill him on the way out, so they should just suck it up. There are small disappointments in everyone’s life.
    He followed Ace’s baseball cap up two crumbling concrete steps and through a door whose hinges looked as if they hadn’t been oiled since the Battle of the Bulge. He almost went right over a two-by-four railing at the end of a three-foot platform on the other side of the door. When he recovered, he realized that, instead of a floor, there was only this small platform of raw wood, evidently placed to keep visitors from plunging headfirst to the ground, and bathed in full sunlight. There was a short two-step wooden staircase scabbed in on the left side.
    As he looked around, Steve realized that the entire building was a stage set–a tent constructed over a section of striped pavement no different from the parking lot outside. The walls were ‘flats,’ a single layer of wood and canvas with two-by-four braces at regular intervals. The outside had been painstakingly crafted to look like real wood and peeling paint, certainly well enough to fool anything but the closest inspection. On the inside, the walls were just bare tan canvas with random streaks and dribbles of tan and green paint.
    At the far end, about a dozen military types in the usual camouflaged work uniforms and leather tool belts were using pulleys to raise a triangular set piece with painted-on shingles– apparently the roof–up onto three large wooden poles. It reminded Steve of the time he’d seen a real three-ring circus tent go up. Once that was finished, Steve thought, there’d be no way to tell this from a dozen other 1940s-era barracks or office buildings that sat within a few hundred yards of their location.
    “This wasn’t prepared this morning. What else did the NSA want to conceal?” Steve smiled at an idle thought. “Keggers? Good-bye parties with strippers bursting out of a cake?” Then he looked at the serious, nerdy faces of the men and women around him and decided a way to hide all-night cram sessions was a lot more likely.
    Ace moved briskly down the steps and headed for a milling crowd of about twenty men and women. Steve could see that they were wearing everything from full battle dress to white smocks and pocket protectors to the head-to-toe Plexiglas protection suits that the sexy doctor on The Last Ship always wore when she was working with the virus that had killed off the rest of mankind. Suddenly, Steve stopped thinking that any of this was terribly