Pickens looked at the two men and decided that all was indeed well between them. Whatever had happened was part of the job, and they respected each other.

“I’m sorry the operation went sideways,” Jake said, “and I’m sorry that good men died, but that’s all the more reason why Yaxaas has to be next.”

His look and his tone told the others that he was serious.

“I’m going to kill him.”

Pickens looked distressed. He’d heard Ted explicitly order Jake to stand down. Putting more men and the Agency’s reputation further at risk was going to infuriate Graves.

But not Clap. He sat down on the living room sofa with a confession of his own.

“There was this bomb-maker in Iraq back when I was in the army—all his devices had a real distinct signature—and we figured he’d killed thirty-three of our guys and at least five hundred Iraqi civilians. We put on a full-court press to find him and after a couple of months we finally dialed in his location, but it was in a residential neighborhood in western Mosul, in the middle of an insurgent stronghold. There was no place to land helos and he would have seen a ground force coming from a mile away, so my teammate and I snuck into the area disguised as civilians and set up in an apartment that was four hundred fifty-two meters from his building.

“We were there for a week. It hit 115 degrees every day, maybe 125 once or twice. I was stiff, my back hurt, and I had a headache like someone had stuck a drill in my brain, but I wanted that sonofabitch dead so bad that I couldn’t think of anything else, so we stayed put. Sometimes when it gets that hot the locals head up to the roof to sleep, where it’s cooler, and I was on the gun one night when he came onto the roof. They had sheets hung up for concealment, but there was a little breeze and I caught a glimpse of the bomb-maker when the sheets flapped in the wind. He couldn’t have been outside for more than three seconds when I pulled the trigger. The first round went low/right and smacked into a short concrete wall around the roof. He heard the impact, but I’d already sent the second shot by the time he figured out what it was. That .308 Winchester caught him in the side, and he was done.

“Look, Jake,” Clap continued. “Killing that bomb-maker was one of the most satisfying moments in my life. My teammate and I probably saved a couple hundred lives—so don’t feel guilty about wanting Yaxaas dead. Your reasons are just.”

Jake was sitting at the kitchen table and staring at the floor. He wasn’t an assassin, and he’d be violating orders if he dropped the hammer on Yaxaas.