At last she set the cup down and slid her hands over her face. “Thank you. God, I’m tired.” She closed her eyes, and I wondered if she meant to fall asleep there. Then she said, “If we’d been left to our own devices, I think none of the Horsemen would have willingly been within a hundred miles of each other. As predators go, we were more like tigers than wolves. Forcing us together like that just made us worse.”

“That gave you a taste for the furtive life?” I asked.

I expected her to ignore me, or, more likely, to turn one of her phrases that sounded impressive and gave away nothing. Instead, she said, “Christ, no. If it gave me a taste for anything… no, only a distaste. For myself, among other things.” She sighed and tipped her head back against the chair. It was harder to see her expression now. “What a damned waste of human potential it all was.”

“Turning Central America into an archipelago wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for you?”

“Is that the proper ambition of humankind? We had — we were like gods.” She gave a gasp of uncomfortable-sounding laughter. “We were like gods. Think of Zeus: He could turn himself into a shower of gold, and all he wanted to do was to cheat on his wife. We played savage practical jokes, ruined lives, and wreaked vengeance. That was our contribution to society.”

“Why did they keep you?”

“Who?”

“The army. Or whoever.”

“Why did they keep the stealth bomber? I’m sorry,” she said when I shook my head. “You don’t know what the stealth bomber was. Or you don’t remember. I suppose they’d spent too much money on us. Though, to be fair, we did exactly what we were meant to do, as long as we felt like it.”

“Which was?” I knew, in a vague way; but something told me that Frances discussing the past was a rare commodity. It seemed a shame to let her stop now, when, if she kept on, she might get to… something I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear.

She drew her feet up in the chair, folded her arms over her knees, and propped her chin on her crossed wrists. “Objective,” she said crisply. My experience of lecturing professors was all from actors on video, but she reminded me of those. “To provide lousy intelligence and advice to El Presidente de la Republica Banana. Old-fashioned method: feed fake dispatches and phony coded orders to his intelligence staff, and hope they don’t realize it was too easy to get. Newfangled method: mount a Horseman on his Jefe de Seguridad, maybe another on his Secretary of State. Not only do you get hand delivery of your bogus information; you also get a highly placed double agent with an impenetrable cover. Que bueno, si? And that, of course, was only one of our many uses.”

“Did it work?”

Her grin was feral. “Sometimes. And before you ask, we’ll leave the exceptions decently buried, thank you. Since they ranged from the deeply shameful to the utterly horrific.”