DC By the Book

Excerpt: From the Old Executive Office Building, a hulking gray mound of a structure festooned with columns like a child's sand castle, F Street stretched westward through an eclectic mix of large glass-and-concrete cubes, old apartment houses and small hotels, university residences and Federal-period townhouses, some of which were private residences, some of which were private clubs, and some of which housed a few of the special-interest groups and foundations that spring like weeds throughout the nation's capitol.

Excerpt: On the western edge of Georgetown, on a high bluff overlooking the C&O Canal and the Potomac River, in a loft atop a narrow, clapboard-sided townhouse, Philo Machus sat perfectly still.... The room was dark except for the light of two gooseneck lamps at either end of a long workbench crowded with computers, keyboards, telephones and their scramblers and decoders, and a bank of radio equipment. A single window at one end of the room had long since been boarded up with the same sound-insulating material that composed the single, solid door; which had no handle but only a case-hardened dead bolt.... He dialed the first of his many preplanned calls and, while he waited for an answer, simultaneously booted up two separate but interlinked computers, and then a third computer attached to a special modem coded to a line that the level-seven technician from the NSA guaranteed was impenetrable. He then reached for a notebook thick with names and codes and contact points, and he smiled.