Knight avoided eye contact with Lee, hoping he might still be able to talk them both out of it. “It’s going to cost you. A lot.”

Lee nodded, pleased to have Knight behind him. “Get back to me with a price.”

As Lee departed, Knight clutched the railing to hold himself upright, still processing the bargain he had just made, as the fever ravaged his body.

CHAPTER 40 DEATH OF A SALESMAN

CHAPTER 40
DEATH OF A SALESMAN

langley, virginia

Davis sat stiffly in a chair in the hallway, reflecting on the depth of the hole he had dug for himself. He had lied to his daughter’s private school when he told them that the check he had sent was lost in the mail. He had lied to his wife that everything was fine at work. The more desperate he became, the more lies he had told to paper everything over. He needed a promotion, or his little house of lies would come crashing down.

Davis could feel his breath growing shallow, as if his lungs couldn’t expand to bring in enough air. He’d had a full-blown panic attack two years ago, which landed him in the hospital and then tethered him to a Xanax prescription that he had only recently managed to wean himself from. However, when a wave of anxiety hit him—as had occurred in Sumatra and was happening again right now—he would still have to force himself to breathe through it, to avoid it snowballing into a fit of hypoxia and hyperventilation. He cursed himself for throwing out the last bottle of Xanax and not heeding his doctor’s advice to keep one in his wallet just in case this very situation arose.

If there was ever a time Davis didn’t want to look like a man coming apart at the seams, it was now. Today, he would find out whether he was getting the bump to GS-14, and though he hadn’t gotten his investigation over the goal line, he had gathered compelling data on poaching networks in Africa and had drawn concrete connections to genuine terrorists on the CTC’s shit list.

Davis paused, holding his breath with his eyes closed as he waited in the hallway.

“Director Wilkes will see you now,” a woman’s voice announced.

Davis opened his eyes and stepped into the director’s office, where he was flanked by Wilkes’s second in command, Ron Nelson. Davis sat down, still holding his breath, praying the symptoms would go away before he had to speak.