Addis went into the living room. A stack of fashion magazines was on a coffee table. A lava lamp and a bong were on the mantle above the fireplace. A framed poster commemorating a Monet exhibit was on the wall. On the couch was a pile of Jane Austen novels. Studying Sartre and de Beauvoir by day, servicing international bureaucrats at night—Addis wondered how much of a secret world truly existed. Spouses lying to each other. Employees padding books. Children deceiving parents and vice versa. Community leaders doing the unspeakable. Who was renting all those behind-the-counter videos in those nice shopping malls? Calling those 900 numbers?

After years of working in government, Addis had changed his view on how the world works. He had grown up a devotee of Watergate. He could cite whole passages of the tapes. As an adolescent, he had pored over the Warren Commission report and could list the dozens of suspicious holes and contradictions in the official account. He had believed then that the official reality open to public inspection merely veiled a hidden world, where the true power resided and the truly significant decisions were reached. But government service had prompted him to reconsider. Bureaucracies were too incompetent to create, manage, and maintain extensive conspiracies. Interagency competition would doom any plot that relied on cooperation among various portions of the government. Spend a week in government, and anyone would see that it was impossible for the Pentagon, the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA to agree on anything, let alone how to cover up a presidential assassination for decades. Most government malfeasance was actually nonfeasance—bumbling conducted by cover-your-ass bureaucrats, not intricate schemes authored by masterminds.

There were secrets. Secret meetings, secret plans, secret wars, secret deals. Addis had seen a few, yet nothing monumental, and few that would profoundly affect history’s overall shape. A favor for a contributor. A private understanding between the President and a foreign head of state that was not shared with Congress. But these secrets did not comprise an entire other world. Addis had concluded that, in general, life is pretty much what it appears to be. Oswald probably had done it. But recent events—events that had transpired before the Hanover assassination—had caused him to reevaluate, to wonder if the world revolved upon small secrets. Nothing grand, no global plots, but a long line of modest, economy-size secrets—like Silva’s secrets—that, taken together, formed a covert patchwork that blended seamlessly into the pattern of everyday life as we see it.

Addis called the White House and checked his messages. There were no calls he wanted to return. From the living room, he could hear Dunne gently interrogating Silva.

“So tell me about Raymond,” Dunne asked. “What’s his last name?”

Silva did not know. The name of the receptionist in the office? She only had been told the first name: Maria.