Then they went home to Louisiana. He found the better job, teaching at Tulane; she rejected her father’s offer to join the family business and took a position at a community college in New Orleans. During the campaign for attorney general, Hanover attacked the influence peddlers and corrupt contractors, and she cheered him on. When he assailed her father by name—after the hospital built by one of Mason’s many business partners collapsed—Chasie Mason issued a public ultimatum. His daughter would have to choose: him or Hanover. She stayed with Hanover; her father announced that he had written her out of his will. The media embraced the story of the woman who gave up millions of dollars for love. The father and daughter were never seen together in public. All three network news shows ran reports on Bob Hanover and Margaret Mason’s wedding.

On the screen was a scene from the television movie. An actress playing Margaret was confronting an actor playing Chasie. Lancette pushed the mute button on the remote.

From the window in her office, she could see the crowd lining Memorial Bridge. She chastised herself for having forgotten once again to pick up the plants she had ordered for the office. Then she tried to focus on the papers before her. Responses to her high-priority inquiry had come in from dozens of offices.

One by one, she pulled reports from the stack on her desk and examined the documents—to make sure that the mandatory computerphoto comparisons had been conducted, that agent files had been checked, that potential agent files had been scrutinized, that all employee records had been located and screened, that the task had been overseen and reviewed by the unit chief, that cooperation had been full.

It was methodical work. She began with the replies from the Directorate of Operations. These were the records she always reviewed first. The DO was the home of the case officers, the covert operators, the agents, the contract agents, the clandestine warriors—the troublemakers. Nine out of ten Agency embarrassments emanated from these quarters. All their reports came back negative, with no one fitting the known details.

She began to relax. Nothing from the DO probably meant there was nothing at all. Next came the Directorate of Intelligence: the egghead wing of the Agency, where analysts pored over reams of data to determine the rate of soybean production in this or that country, or whether some maniacal colonel might be considering a coup in some backwater capital. The DI had been her home base. Again, nothing.

Then the Science and Technology Directorate—no hits here.