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“Right, that was interesting.”

This was likely to be mere politeness talking. But then she glanced at him, went on: “I saw one proposal there that I thought was a good one, that the panel ended up turning down.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. By a Yann Pierzinski.”

“Oh yes. I remember. That was a good one. I was the outside member of his doctoral committee at Caltech. He does really interesting work.”

“Yes,” she said. “But the panel didn’t agree.”

“No, I was surprised at that.”

“Me too. So when Small Delivery told me they were looking for a biomathematician, I recommended him.”

“Oh, is that what happened?”

“Yes.”

Her irises were a kind of mahogany color, speckled with lighter browns. Was this the face of what science could become, so vivacious and sophisticated?

“Well,” he said carefully, “good for him. I liked his proposal too.”

“You didn’t seem to at the time.”

“Well—I was on his doctoral committee. And I try not to be one of the evaluators in my panels anyway.”

“No?”

“No. I just run the panel. I don’t want to sway anyone.”

“Then you must have to be careful which proposals you assign to Stuart Thornton,” she said with a brief ironic smile.

“Oh I don’t know!” he said defensively, startled. “Do you think so?”

“Hmm.” She watched him.

“I guess I know what you mean. It was probably a mistake to invite him on the panel at all. But, you know.” He waved a hand: people legitimately on the cutting edge deserved to be asked, no matter their personalities.

She frowned very slightly, as if she did not agree, or did not like him pretending she did not know what he had done.

Frank forged on. “Anyway it sounds like Yann ended up all right, thanks to you.”

“Yes. Hopefully so.” She sipped her latte. Her fingers were long, her fingernails polished with a clear gloss. A thin wedding band was the only jewelry she wore. Frank looked down, unwilling to meet her sharp gaze. Her shoes were open-toed, her toenails colored pink. Frank had always considered toenail polish to be a kind of intelligence test that its users had embarrassingly failed; but here was Dr. Taolini, tenured at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, exposing pink toenails to the world without embarrassment. He would have to rethink some of his opinions.

“Still,” he said tentatively, “even though Yann has ended up all right, I’d like to get him into one of these new institutes.”

“Maybe you can,” she said. “Multiple appointments aren’t that unusual anymore.”

“In academia, anyway. Do you think his contract would allow for that kind of thing?”

She shrugged, made a little gesture of her own; how should I know, I’m just a consultant.

He had learned what he was going to learn about her connection to Yann. Pressing further would look weird. She basked in the windy sun, would soon want to go back in to the conference.

He could ask her outright if she knew anything about the surveillance. He could share what he knew. It was another prisoner’s dilemma: they both knew things the other could probably benefit from knowing, but it was a risk to bring them up; the other might defect. The safest thing was to defect pre-emptively. But Frank wanted to try the more generous strategies these days, and so he wanted to tell her: We’re being watched by Homeland Security, in a surveillance clustered around Pierzinski. Did you know? Why do you think that is? What do you think is going on?

But then she could very justifiably ask, how do you know? And then he would be stuck. He could not say, because I’ve fallen in love with a spook who kissed me in an elevator, and she told me all about it. That just wasn’t something he wanted to say to this woman.

Although in another way he did; it would be great to be close enough to this person to confide in her. She might laugh, might lean into his shoulder again, to draw out more of the tale.

But in fact he wasn’t that close to her. So he couldn’t talk about it.

A different approach occurred to him. “I’m getting interested in finding algorithms or other