sun seemed
confused, Malone thought. If this were the Sahara, obviously there was
no reason whatever for the Potomac to be running through it. The sun
was doing its best to correct this small error, however, by exerting
even more heat in a valiant attempt to dry up the river.

Its attempt was succeeding, at least partially. The Potomac was still
there, but quite a lot of it was not in the river bed any more.
Instead, it had gone into the air, which was so humid by now that
Malone was willing to swear that it was splashing into his lungs at
every inhalation. Resisting an impulse to try the breaststroke, he
stood in the full glare of the straining sun, just outside the Senate
Office Building. He looked across at the Capitol, just opposite,
squinting his eyes manfully against the glare of its dome in the
brightness.

The Capitol was, at any rate, some relief from the sight of Thomas
Boyd and a group of agents busily grilling two technicians. That was
going on in the Senate Office Building, and Malone had come over to
watch the proceedings. Everything had been set up in what Malone
considered the most complicated fashion possible. A big room had been
turned into a projection chamber, and films were being run off over
and over. The films, taken by hidden cameras watching the
computer-secretaries, had caught two technicians red-handed punching
errors into the machines. Boyd had leaped on this evidence, and he and
his crew were showing the movies to the technicians and questioning
them under bright lights in an effort to break down their resistance.

But it didn't look as though they were going to have any more success
than the sun was having, turning Washington into the Sahara. After
all, Malone told himself, wiping his streaming brow, there were no
Pyramids in Washington. He tried to discover whether that made any
sense, but it was too much work. He went back to thinking about Boyd.

The technicians were sticking to their original stories that the
mistakes had been honest ones. It sounded like a sensible idea to
Malone; after all, people did make mistakes. And the FBI didn't have a
single shred of evidence to prove that the technicians were engaged in
deliberate sabotage. But Boyd wasn't giving up. Over and over he got
the technicians to repeat their stories, looking for discrepancies or
slips. Over and over he ran off the films of their mistakes, looking
for some clue, some shred of evidence.

Even the sight of the Ca