Stepping out of the car, the heat was oppressive. The redbrick houses soaked up every bit of the sun but the summer wasn’t pleasant like it was in Teaneck, it was a sickly heat, like a tropical fever. If the main streets were dirty, the alleys were something else, piled up with trash like they were waiting for a flood to wash it all away. Not such a bad idea, Yates thought, a flood, an almighty deluge, maybe it could take some of these layabout losers at the same time. He crossed the street, feeling everyone’s eyes on him, hundreds of eyes squinting at him in the sunlight. Kids stopped playing. Men stopped their conversations, following him with controlled dislike, not expressive enough to get themselves into trouble, just enough to make it clear they hated him. Let them hate him! Let them think his opinions had to do with the colour of their skin. But the truth was that he didn’t care what colour their skin was: he cared what kind of men they were – the colour of their soul. And a man worked. He tried to make his country a better place. He wanted to tell them that a man without a job wasn’t a man, and yet he was sure that they wouldn’t get it. They were alien to him, as surely as those Soviet Communists were.

Yates had worked for COINTELPRO, the FBI Counter-Intelligence Program, since its inception in 1956. Over the past nine years he’d become one of the programme’s leading agents, making his name hindering the efforts of the National Committee to Abolish HUAC – the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A committee tobolish a committee: but those activists hadn’t the wit to even spot the ridiculousness of their name, let alone their entire enterprise. They were too busy arguing for the rights of traitors, engaged in an abstract academic debate about how the individual’s rights were more important than the well-being of their society. He would’ve thought Communists would understand that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. They had no interest in the fact that there were real plots intended to do real harm against his country. They dismissed those arguments as scaremongering. Their complacency disgusted him. He’d seen the plots, the plans – he understood their way of life was hated by a powerful enemy and needed protecting.