Dunne squeezed the arms of the chair. I led them to Gillian Silva, he thought—for the thousandth time. Grayton was watching me from the first. He realized that anyone investigating on their own posed a threat.

The masked figures on television were explaining that they had identified and located Raymond DeNoefri after breaking into his office and collecting fingerprints samples. They acknowledged that they had raided the apartment and killed Dawkins and Lopez, after being informed by their new commander that intelligence proved the pair had been part of the conspiracy to assassinate Hanover. It had been the commander who found the white supremacist material beneath the bed.

The image switched to M. T. O’Connor at the witness table, denying she had told Jordan to murder Harris Griffith. Next, a gaunt, pale Flip Whalen—his wife Amelia had died three weeks earlier—claiming he knew none of the secret details of the Blue Ridge deal. Secretary of the Treasury Louis Alter appearing irritated, as legislators questioned him. Why hadn’t Alter taken Dunne’s suspicions more seriously? Had Grayton informed him of the problem at hand, that Dunne’s probing could undermine the entire administration? Alter dismissing the speculation with indignation.

There was CIA Director Timothy Wenner announcing his resignation, maintaining he had been misled by Grayton and claiming he had been unaware that Grayton had intervened with the Agency’s director of administration to suppress Charlie Walters’s original ICEMAN report. Walters’s attorney announcing a $35 million suit against the U.S. government, charging that the CIA’s Office of Security, at Grayton’s behest, had sent him off to Africa and then had set him up.

The montage segued to Ken Byrd, the former press secretary, crying during an interview. A shot of Mike Finn, the former political director, in a luxurious office overlooking the Potomac, his cane lying on the desk. This was the cover of his just-published, bestselling memoirs, Blind Luck, which he secretly had been writing throughout his time at the White House.

A mug shot of Matthew Levon Morrison, the Marine washout transformed into a government killer as a political favor. A picture of his mother: Helen “Happy” Morrison. Footage from the bombing in Tangiers. A tourist’s snapshot of a dead man in a hotel lobby. And an autopsy photograph showing a tattoo on the man’s chest: an M with a dagger.

T. L., Dunne thought. Team Leader. The last survivor of the secret hit team Grayton had organized several years ago, with the knowledge of Mumfries, who then was chairing the Senate intelligence committee. The outsider whom Grayton had placed in charge of his more recent creation, the interagency SWAT unit. The man who had shot Dunne and killed Gillian Silva, Raymond DeNoefri, and Julia Lancette. All to prevent one truth of the assassination—that it had resulted in part from the excesses of the national security crowd—from becoming known.