Persuader

words, eighteen letters, three spaces. I stared at them for a long time. Put my finger on the send button. But I didn't press it. I went to backspace instead and erased the message. It disappeared from right to left. The little cursor ate it up. I figured I would send it only when I had to. When I knew for sure.
    I sent: Possibility your computer is penetrated.
    There was a long delay. Much longer than the usual ninety seconds. I thought she wasn't going to answer. I thought she must be ripping her wires out of the wall. But maybe she was just getting out of the shower or something because about four minutes later she came back with a simple: Why? I sent: Talk of a hacker with partial access to government systems.
    She sent: Mainframes or LANs? I had no idea what she meant. I sent: Don't know.
    She asked: Details? I sent: Just talk. Are you keeping a log on your laptop? She sent: Hell no! I sent: Anywhere? She sent: Hell no!! I sent: Eliot? There was another four-minute delay. Then she came back with: Don't think so .
    I asked: Think or know? She sent: Think.
    I stared at the tiled wall in front of me. Breathed out. Eliot had killed Teresa Daniel . It was the only explanation. Then I breathed in. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe he hadn't. I sent: Are these e-mails vulnerable? We had been e-mailing back and forth furiously for more than sixty hours. She had asked for news of her agent. I had asked for her agent's real name. And I had asked in a way that definitely wasn't gender-neutral. Maybe I had killed Teresa Daniel.
    I held my breath until Duffy came back with: Our e-mail is encrypted. Technically might be visible as code but no way is it readable.
    I breathed out and sent: Sure? She sent: Totally.
    I sent: Coded how? She sent: NSA billion-dollar project.
    That cheered me up, but only a little. Some of NSA's billion-dollar projects are in the Washington Post before they're even finished. And communications snafus screw more things up than any other reason in the world.
    I sent: Check with Eliot immediately about computer logs.
    She sent: Will do. Progress? I typed: None.
    Then I deleted it and sent: Soon. I thought it might make her feel better.
    I went all the way down to the ground-floor hallway. The door to Elizabeth's parlor was standing open. She was still in the armchair. Doctor Zhivago was facedown in her lap and she was staring out the window at the rain. I opened the front door and stepped outside.
    The metal detector squawked at the Beretta in my pocket. I closed the door behind me and headed straight across the carriage circle and down the driveway. The rain was hard on my back. It ran down my neck. But the wind helped me. It blew me west, straight toward the gatehouse. I felt light on my feet. Coming back again was going to be harder. I would be walking directly into the wind. Assuming I was still walking at all.
    Paulie saw me coming. He must have spent his whole time crouched inside the tiny building, prowling from the front windows to the back windows, watching, like a restless animal in its lair. He came out, in his slicker. He had to duck his head and turn sideways to get through the door. He stood with his back against the wall of his house, where the eaves were low. But the eaves didn't help him. The rain drove horizontally under them. I could hear it lashing against the slicker, hard and loud and brittle. It drove against his face and ran down it like torrents of sweat. He had no hat. His hair was plastered against his forehead. It was dark with water.
    I had both hands in my pockets with my shoulders hunched forward and my face ducked into my collar. My right hand was tight around the Beretta. The safety was off. But I didn't want to use it. Using it would require complicated explanations. And he would only be replaced. I didn't want to have him replaced until I was ready to have him replaced. So I didn't want to use the Beretta. But I was prepared to.
    I stopped six feet from him. Out of his reach.
    "We need to talk," I said.
    "I don't want to talk," he said.
    "You want to arm wrestle instead?" His eyes were pale blue and his pupils were tiny. I guessed his breakfast had been taken entirely in the form of capsules and powder.
    "Talk about what?" he said.
    "New situation," I said.
    He said nothing.
    "What's your MOS?" I asked.
    MOS is an army acronym. The army loves acronyms. It stands for Military Occupational Specialty. And I used the present tense. What is, not what was. I wanted to put him right