On most days of the workweek, Leland Babbitt left his Chevy Chase home around seven forty-five a.m. to make it into his office in the District by eight thirty. But this Monday morning his garage door hummed and opened at a quarter till seven, and Babbitt emerged behind the wheel of his silver Lexus and backed down the driveway out onto the street.

A black Lincoln Navigator sat parked in front of Babbitt’s home, and inside it four men raised their hands towards Babbitt’s car.

Babbitt acknowledged them briefly with a nod as he passed them by. He wasn’t going to stop to chat with his home protection detail. He had somewhere important to be today—a clandestine rendezvous arranged with a high-profile official—so his attention was focused on beating the traffic and making it to his destination in plenty of time.

A half hour later Babbitt parked in the lot by the Capitol reflecting pool, climbed out of his Lexus, and pulled on a trench coat, and then he began walking west along the National Mall.

Leland Babbitt was director of Townsend Government Services, a private intelligence and security firm that worked on classified projects for the United States intelligence community. Townsend had been around for 150 years, making a big name in an extremely low-profile industry by employing some of the best headhunters in the world. Townsend had gotten its start in the old West when its investigators tracked down train robbers, bank robbers, even marauding renegade Indians. In the following century Townsend hunted Nazis and Russian spies, it helped catch Noriega and Serbian war criminals, and in the 2000s it had a hand in the capture of Saddam Hussein as well as many of the leadership of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

But on its most recent mission Townsend Government Services had failed unequivocally.

Leland Babbitt and his company had been chasing the Gray Man for years on a cost-plus contract with the U.S. government. They’d come to within a hair’s breadth of killing him in Brussels; Babbitt himself had been there at the scene during the gun battle. Unfortunately for everyone, Gentry had escaped, and in the process he’d killed some of Babbitt’s men and wounded others.

The shoot-out in Brussels had been a major news event, of course, and although Babbitt had managed to avoid exposure in the media for himself and his firm, since Brussels, Denny Carmichael had treated Lee Babbitt like he had the plague. The Director of the National Clandestine Service had flatly refused every meeting, every teleconference, even private phone conversations with the director of Townsend since he’d returned to the U.S. Only a few clipped and businesslike e-mails had come from Carmichael to Babbitt, and these made clear that NCS was indefinitely suspending its contracts with Townsend and removing the private firm’s access to classified material.