“Fuck them.” Whitman jumped up, held out his hand, fingers wiggling. “Let me see those files.”

“Were you suddenly elevated to CEO?”

Whitman, looming over the desk, appeared not to hear him. “It’s my right. My team—my freaking right.”

“Sit. The. Fuck. Down.”

The two men, engaged in a staring contest, were immobile. The atmosphere in the room turned gelid, as if the clash of their respective wills had sealed them in amber.

Whitman, possibly coming to terms with the futility of his position, finally fell back. “Okay, okay.” Slowly, deliberately, he sat back down.

Cutler, seeming to relax a couple of notches, shook his head. “This is typical of you, Gregory, you know that? I’ve got very powerful people perched on my shoulder like owls, their claws digging into my flesh. I’ve got the politics to consider, you don’t. It’s imperative to think things through clearly and completely.”

“What’s to think?” Whitman inched forward until he was on the edge of his chair. “Like other security contractors, we’re hired by the NSA. Like other security contractors, we hose the government, but also give them access to services their own people cannot provide. We do the real overseas dirty work for the United States government. But unlike other contractors you have us—or at least you did. We did the real down and dirty work no one would trust even normal contractors to do. But there’s nothing normal about what we do; it’s the kind of crap that if it ever saw the light of day would surely topple the current administration, no matter how much plausible deniability they believe insulates them from the sewer Red Rover works in on every brief.”

“What is this?” Cutler spread his hands. “A pitch for a raise?”

“Yeah,” Whitman said sourly. “I want Sandy’s salary as well as mine.”

The edge of Cutler’s hand sliced through the air, cutting through Whitman’s sarcasm. “Your job, in case you forgot, is to return Red Rover to operational level. Assemble your team, Gregory. Leave the mole hunting to me.”

The staring contest resumed as if it had never been broken off, while the tension in the room ratcheted up another couple of notches to strangulation level. Cutler’s phone rang, but he ignored it. His assistant, Valerie, could be heard briefly outside his door, as she told someone in her not-to-be-brooked tone that the boss could not be disturbed. While inside, the staring match continued unabated.

“Listen, listen,” Cutler said at length, apparently feeling it was his turn to back off. “It’s not just Red Rover that’s gone to hell in a handbasket, it’s the entire world.” His tone had lost its hard edge, was even a touch conciliatory, unusual for Cutler. But then Whitman was his most prized operative. The Red Rover team would have been inconceivable without him. “Do you think you can settle yourself enough to hear what I have to say?”

Whitman didn’t reply, but neither did he get up and walk out. Cutler took this as a positive sign, because he continued. “Iraq, Syria, Lebanon—a Devil’s triangle. After a decade of fighting overseas, battling Taliban, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda cadres of all stripes and nationalities, after losing men left, right, and center, we are back where we started. Al-Qaeda has retaken Fallujah, where our boys fought them back tooth and nail. For what? Post-American Middle East is worse than ever. A power vacuum has arisen, as all the major players have left the field. In their place a whole host of Islamic jihadists have rushed in, fire-bombing, massacring, destroying whoever does not conform to their particular brand of cruel sectarianism. In both Iraq and Syria, extremists of all stripes have parlayed their foothold into majority stakes.