The men noticed him peering in and smiled sheepishly. Kevin smiled back. One of them was sprawled out on a ratty old Goodwill sofa under the window, sound asleep. It was Marwan Habibi. He frequently slept in his lab, just as Kevin frequently slept in his. But this evening he appeared to be passed out rather than merely asleep.
It was easy enough to figure this out: the end of the academic year was not far away, some of these guys were hoping to get their hoods and tassels come May, they had been working themselves like slaves in Lab 304 for years, and they must have just passed some milestone in their research. Kevin threw them a thumbs-up and kept on going without breaking stride; he had miles to go before he slept and didn’t want to be invited in for Kool-Aid. He proceeded to the little kitchen in the center of the wing and threw his dinner into the microwave.
The only one of those guys he really knew was Marwan Habibi, and Marwan was already unconscious, so there didn’t seem much point in trying to join the party. The Arabs here tended to be pretty secular. Many of them enjoyed the occasional shot of whiskey. But even a heavy drinker—which Marwan certainly was not—couldn’t stand up to pure-grain alcohol for very long. Kevin was impressed with how smart and how professional Marwan was. He was working on a project to control the gas-producing tendencies of the bacteria that lived in the guts of cows, which caused them to fart a lot, which in tur nexacerbated the greenhouse effect. Arthur Larsen, the Rainmaker, was hardly known as an environmentalist, but he had squeezed a cool half million out of the EPA for this and packed Marwan’s lab with the latest and best equipment for culturing and studying the habits of bacteria. Marwan kept door 304 closed, but from time to time Kevin invited him into 302 as he walked past, and chatted with him for a while. It was all part of his self-imposed responsibilities as mayor of the third floor.
He attacked his dinner with the flimsy plastic fork provided, finding the utensil highly unsatisfying. But the beans were great. He scraped every gram of sauce from the plastic tray and then threw the remains into the garbage can. He bought a Coke from the vending machine and headed back toward his lab. The door to 304 was closed now, but the party was still going on.
It was about half an hour later when he heard the honking of a car horn below in the parking lot. The music from 304 abruptly stopped. This was typical; the Arabs had a heavy hand on the horn button, which locals found startling and even frightening.
Kevin had his door open, so he could hear the voices of the Arabs as they departed 304. They were rowdy and happy. “Take care you don’t bang Marwan’s head on the door frame!” one of them said in perfect British-accented English. Kevin looked up to see them moving down the hall, carrying the dozing Marwan Habibi on their shoulders. One of them smiled sheepishly at Kevin as he went by. “A little too much!” he said, sticking out his thumb and pinkie and wiggling them.
“Tell him congratulations from Kevin when he wakes up,” Kevin said.
“Oh, yes,” the Arab said, “we will certainly tell him.”
Chapter Seven
As Betsy Vandeventer came stomping and sneezing up Clarendon early in the morning, she could see parallel strata of light shining from the windows of the several newish office buildings that surrounded the Courthouse metro in downtown Arlington. One of them was the Castleman Suites, which she supposed had been chosen by the CIA as overflow space precisely because it looked so utterly normal. An observer familiar with the Agency might have noticed a few clues: the odd construction of the windows, which were supposedly proof against microwave and laser surveillance; the Blue Bird bus that pulled through its horseshoe drive several times a day, ferrying employees out to the main campus at Langley; the fact that the second floor, above the First American Bank branch on the ground floor, was an empty buffer zone. In most ways, Betsy reflected, it really was just another normal office building; people sat in cubicles in front of computer screens, wrote memos, jockeyed for promotions, and played politics.