The scar tissue just under her hairline, where they’d opened her up to remove the tumor back in ’03, was throbbing. It did that at times.

‘She wasn’t just good for us, for the office,’ Wales continued, swirling his whiskey before holding the tumbler up to the firelight. The flames threw long, snaking shadows across the room. ‘I still believe, Caitlin, that there was a chance your last mission in Texas could have ended very differently. There was a good chance that if Blackstone had lived, and if Kipper moved against him with the information you took, I think there was a very good chance he would have tried to take Texas out of the union. It could have meant civil war. Sofia Pieraro averted that outcome when she put him down. Those three IDs she left at the scene, the road agents, they helped us sell the story of Blackstone’s death as a bandit raid.’

Caitlin took a sip on her drink. Unlike the others, she had switched to mineral water hours ago.

‘Funny thing about those guys,’ she said. ‘They belonged to Blackstone. They were in McCutcheon’s files. That never came out, did it?’

‘It didn’t need to,’ replied Wales. ‘She gave us more than enough to start spinning up the myth that Jackson Blackstone was a murdered patriot. And you gave us her.’

‘Yeah. A patriot. Nicely fucking done, Wales.’

Larrison finished his drink and put it aside. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And she’s done very well for us ever since.’

‘How did Sofia take to that? The idea that Blackstone gets to go down in history as a martyred hero.’

The smile on Wales’s long, deeply lined face was wintry. ‘Like you, Caitlin, she’s a realist these days. Or she would be . . .’

‘I sense there’s a “but” coming.’

‘But,’ nodded Larrison, ‘now she has disappeared for real.’

Caitlin said nothing, but Wales seemed disinclined to add anything to his statement.

‘That’s too bad,’ she eventually replied. ‘But what does that have to do with me?’

‘You spent a lot of time with Sofia, staying low after Fort Hood,’ said Larrison. ‘You got to know her at a very vulnerable time. You probably know her as well as anybody in the agency, including her mentor. On all of her profiles and evaluations, she identified you as a significant figure in her salvation.’

‘It’s late, Wales. Really late.’

‘I’d like you to come back, Caitlin. I need you to find Sofia Pieraro. She’s somewhere in the South American Federation. She was working deep inside Roberto’s regime for us. And then she went dark. The same way you went dark after Fort Hood. We need you back, Caitlin. We need to know what’s happened down there. What might be about to happen.’