But back to the present. There was a slight chance a listener was inside, on another call. If so, she-or he, would presumably be coming out in a few minutes-unless she was on a long call. Decision time. Tony decided to wait until five minutes after seven.

He nervously paced up and down the corridor, wondering when a guard might come by and ask him what he was doing here. None did. At three minutes after seven, he tried the Hotline number on his cell phone again. No answer. He left.

Tony went into the third bedroom on the second floor of his townhouse, the one he used as a home office, and fired up his computer. He slept in one of the other bedrooms. Josh occupied the second. Tony decided to check his e-mail. He had an e-mail address at work, of course, but he reserved his home e-mail for his personal life. He could also surf the Internet a little, find out what the stock market did today, visit an adult chat room. After all, he had no girlfriend at the moment.

His spam filter captured a lot of the junk, but some still got through. There was the usual pleading letter from a high-ranking nobody in Nigeria offering him millions of dollars if he would just share his bank account number. He deleted the letter without reading it. After the first few dozen, they all sounded the same.

An e-mail message from the Hotline caught his eye. He clicked on it immediately, partly because he was feeling guilty for skipping his shift, even though it wasn’t his fault. It was from Nancy, the Executive Director, addressed to all listeners. He scanned the note in mounting horror and then went back and read it carefully.