He carried two copies of the memo to the office of Dr. Stan Blum, the head of DA/MA/P. Blum was not there. Walters had the secretary, a new gal, initial both copies. He left one with the secretary, returned to his own office, and waited for interrogators to burst in.

No one came. That is, no one from the Office of Security, no one from the FBI, no one from Secret Service. Just Blum. Thank you for the report, he told Walters. It’s been taken care of. And if you think of whoever that was with the tattoo, do let me know. In the meantime, place your copy in the MA/P central files, so we can locate it if you’re not around. And, remember, you are not to discuss this matter with anyone. Not with anyone.

Blum left the office, and Walters knew—just knew—that his report no longer existed. He was scared.

That night—three days ago—Walters went home to his apartment in the Kennedy-Warren, the large residential complex on Connecticut Avenue. He rummaged through a box in his bedroom closet and found the journal he kept during the months he had worked for the state of Michigan. These were the notes for a book he once considered writing. For the first time in years, he read through all the entries, even the ones about the assault and attempted rape that had left him with an injured kidney and caused him to resign.

A Sam Cooke song started playing on the jukebox. Walters leaned closer to Lancette. “I am not a brave man,” he said. He drank his beer and resumed the story.

There was nothing in the diary about that tattoo. So he went to his storage room in the dank and cavernous basement. He kept two composition books in a crate. In these he had been recording—against regulations—his experiences at the Agency. Notes for another book, this one a novel.

The notebooks were a collection of key words and phrases, not a full-fledged account. The pages contained cryptic references meant to stir his memory later. “Couple/Art dealers/EE” referred to a husband-wife team of officers who posed as art dealers in Eastern Europe. Both were utter drunks. “Multiple fem/Sri”: a female case officer with multiple personality disorder who had to be extracted from Sri Lanka. She had been overseeing a penetration of a Chinese operation to procure restricted computer technology. At a meeting with an asset, the personality of an eleven-year-old girl had emerged. The asset bolted; the mission fell apart. “Nam/ twelve-year-old”: twenty-five years after serving in Vietnam, a former DO man who now worked in the credit union began having horrific nightmares about an adolescent agent he had recruited during the war. She had been killed in a free-fire zone.

Lancette waited patiently as Walters explained himself.