I thank her anyway and walk over to the door. I’d been expecting an office, but I realize his desk was probably at one of the terminals back in the bullpen, alongside his geeks.

Ailes’s voice calls out from the cracked door. “Have a seat, Agent Blackwood, and close the door behind you.”

I’VE BEEN SITTING here for several minutes at a table filled with file folders, watching my inquisitor finish something on his computer. This is either a test of my patience or he’s genuinely overwhelmed.

Ailes holds up a finger, telling me he’ll be another moment. Even seated, I can tell he’s tall. Although graying at the temples, he doesn’t look like an academic. I remember something about him serving in the Navy before getting his PhD. He still has a lot of that bearing. Okay, maybe he doesn’t look like a bishop. He could be a Moorish knight.

My eyes drift around the files on the table. They all have numbers for identifiers. I can see the edge of a magazine poking out of one. Something looks familiar . . .

I know the magazine instantly from just a few centimeters of the cover.

I feel my heart sink.

“Why did you go over Agent Miller’s head on the Hashimi case?”

“Pardon me?” I pull my attention away from the magazine.

Ailes looks up from his screen and sets his reading glasses down. “Miller. Why’d you go over his head?” He gives me the intimidating stare I’d seen across the Quantico campus.

I’d feared repercussions on this. We were trying to pin down a ring of credit card thieves. Three of them worked in the same restaurant chain. I had been tasked with going through miles of credit card receipts to look for other possible accomplices by cross-referencing other fraud cases. The kind of humdrum police work you’ll never see on television.

I reply in a flat tone, “I found fourteen suspicious charges and flagged them. Miller ignored them.”

“So you went over his head?” Ailes raises an eyebrow.

I’ve never been very good at being political. “I think of it as around him. We were on a time crunch.”

“But he’s your supervisor. The FBI put him in charge of the case so he could decide what was important and what was not. Do you think you’re smarter than him?” Ailes emphasizes the word “smarter.”

I shake my head. “He’s got a dozen open cases to supervise. I think if he’d had time to read my memo and look at the data, he would have reached the same conclusion. Nothing more.”

“Why did you suspect Hashimi was the Greenville Killer?”

I don’t know what to say. When I went through a list of flagged charges, I noticed some odd purchases. Rope, bleach and a few other items that would seem innocuous in other situations but not on a credit card fraud case. I got curious and placed them in locations where the Greenville Killer had murdered three people. Part of the reason I went over Miller’s head was it was only a suspicion. I never told anyone. It was a total potential wild-goose hunt. If I’d told my boss I thought one of these low-level credit card thieves was also a potential FBI most-wanted killer, I would have been laughed out of his office and maybe a job.