CID."

"That would be the part you didn't hear on the news-Merrill Benedict was murdered with a LAW and Phillip Fineberg with a Bouncing Betty mine, modified into a command-detonated device."

Long silence. Eventually, the general said, "Shit."

"Enough to bury everybody. Don't worry about it."

But he obviously was worried about it. "You're positive these were U.S. military munitions? Russian and French hardware often find their way inside our borders. Both countries produce weapons analogous to the LAW and the Bouncing Betty."

"Traces of Composition A5 were on Fineberg's corpse-the distinctive propellant used with Bouncing Bettys." I allowed him a brief moment to mull that, then added, "As I hope your duty officer informed you, the killers vowed to assassinate the President. So you might say we're a little concerned about how they got these weapons, and about their access to other military munitions-types, quantities, and so forth."

General Tingle was a cool customer and took this understatement in stride. He stared at me. "All right. So this is… serious. Now, tell me why you-the CIA-are involved?"

"Because there's some chance this involves foreign terrorists."

He nodded. "Time line?"

"If they're true to their word, they'll try to kill the President within the next twenty-four hours."

"You believe this is credible?"

"They just filled two morgues. Don't you?"

He turned to Colonel Johnson. "Al, how long will it take you to scrub the files?"

But before Johnson could reply, I said, "Our FBI friends already did that. We have good reason to believe the weapons were acquired within the last six months, and our other assumptions are fairly obvious. There are three cases that meet our parameters."

I read the case file numbers and dates off my palm to Colonel Johnson, who left to gather the files. Apparently reading my mind, the general ordered coffee, and an aide left to scrounge a pot from the duty officer. The general looked at me and said, "Do you have military experience, Mr. Drummond?"

"I… yes, some."

"Then let me put this in perspective. Right now, we have two wars going on, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army is shipping equipment and munitions at rates not seen since Vietnam. Visit the port at Galveston

… it's like wandering through the aisles of some military Wal-Mart. Thousands of tons of artillery shells, main gun tank rounds, track pads, and spare parts pass out of that port every month."

"Meaning we… you have security problems?" I was having a little trouble with my pronouns.

"We have a security nightmare. Three-quarters of the Army's active, reserve, and National Guard MPs are in Iraq. Nearly all the Army's logistics specialists and security specialists are there, or Afghanistan. We're outsourcing security to civilian firms. They're hiring guys off the street, paying them $8.90 an hour, and begging them not to let their cousins walk through and filch a few Ml6s."

"But these are mines and LAWs," Jennie noted.

The general nodded. "Let me be frank. We don't really know how much is getting ripped off, or lost, or misplaced. And for obvious reasons we can't halt the train to find out. Sometimes, nobody discovers anything missing until the shipping container gets to Iraq or Afghanistan and it's opened and inventoried. Sometimes the guy doing the inventory arbitrarily decides it's just a bookkeeping error. Or he's lazy and doesn't feel like doing the paperwork to report the missing item. And when it's discovered missing overseas, there's always the questions of how, where it was stolen, and when-here, en route, or over there." He paused, and then added, "So what gets detected, and what gets reported to us, and what we choose to report to the FBI, could be a fraction of what's missing."

I traded glances with Jennie. Not good. The weapons could provide us a lead we desperately needed, and we definitely needed to learn what kind of nasty surprises Barnes might have in store. A lot of things go boom in the night, but some booms turn night into day.

But the general had another point to make. "During peacetime, our accountability, and our follow-up to thefts and losses, are exceptionally good. But what's seriously important in times of peace often becomes trivial when people are fighting and dying. So don't get your hopes up."

Incidentally, I found it both instructive and disconcerting to be on the other side of the table, observing the behavior of military officers through civilian eyes. The military is a brotherhood, or, these days, I guess, a brother-sisterhood. Even though most of the men in this room dressed like civilians, and even looked like civilians, they did not think or act like civilians. Jennie and I were here to stick our noses into an institutional embarrassment, and from their aloofness, shifty gazes, and occasional conversational hesitations, clearly we were not part of the tribe, nor were our efforts appreciated. Nobody was going to lie or deliberately misinform us, but getting the full truth could prove difficult.

I kicked Jennie under the table. She looked up at me, and I twirled my finger through the air. It took a moment before she got it. She reached into her pocket, withdrew her tape recorder, and placed it on the table. The officers all stared at it. She did not turn it on, but it sat there, a warning that only truth better be spoken inside this room.

Jennie smiled at them and said, "A completely harmless formality."

It didn't go over particularly well.

Anyway, we chitchatted a while about the murders, and I offered them a condensed version of the Jason Barnes story while we waited for Colonel Johnson to return with those three files. The coffee came and my mood brightened.

Despite his job title, General Tingle, it turned out, was a fairly amiable and even charming guy, with a good gift for gab, and he even tried out a few jokes on us, though his timing was off and they came off a little flat. You could tell he was a little unfocused and stressed, thinking ahead about how it was going to look for Uncle Sam's Army when word got out that weapons intended to kill Al-Qaeda assholes and bad Iraqis had been used to exterminate important members of the U.S. executive and judiciary branches.

For some weird reason, I thought of the inscription on the side of the directional Claymore mine that reads, "Point this side toward the enemy." Yet in every conflict there is always the guy who's exhausted or nervous or hurrying, and the enemy moves into his sights, and he squeezes the triggering mechanism, and ten thousand tiny pellets fly up his own ass.

Despite the best precautions and the best intentions, sometimes shit just happens.