“With all due respect,” said Karl, who occupied the only other chair set off to the other side of the semicircle, “this is your mother’s show. I wish she were here to be a part of this. For those of you who don’t know—or only caught a whiff of the story—everything you see here is the work of a single person: Helen Gray. Devin’s mother. Helen took her life under what can only be described as inexplicable circumstances, though I have a theory, for another time. She put this together after trying to warn authorities for years. She even warned me back in 2007, but as most of you know, I was a bit preoccupied with another conspiracy. I just wanted everyone to know that one woman, a true American patriot in every sense of the word, easily spent several thousand hours of her time, at great cost, to assemble this. A truly remarkable accomplishment.”

Berg looked teary eyed, which made this difficult for Devin. He simply nodded at Berg, focusing all his remaining energy on not crying. This didn’t strike him as an emotional crowd, and the last thing he wanted to do was give them the final nudge toward shelving him during the upcoming operation. Marnie squeezed his hand briefly as Rich raised his coffee mug.

“To Helen Gray. To your mother,” he said.

Rich got down to business the moment the toast ended.

“Everyone has been briefed on the overall concept of operations moving forward. Find the Ozarks camp, if it exists. Still a big if. The camp should shed some more light on the size and scope of the sleeper network. If we can directly link it to these sleepers, jackpot. At the very least, finding the camp could put some federal eyes on the situation. If we can get that ball rolling, I’m fairly certain it will grow wings and fly. Backup to that is to target the seventy-three sleepers identified by Helen Gray and look for a crack in their armor. Someone willing to spill the beans. Given the program’s history of sacrificing their young, I don’t know if that will yield anything short of a tortured confession, if that. Not exactly what we want to package up and deliver to the FBI. G and G. What do you have for us?”

Graves nodded at Gupta, who tapped a few keys to bring up an array of faces on the widescreen monitor. Eight faces split into four pairs. Pictures taken at the intersection last night compared to what looked like candid surveillance photographs.

“To start, last night’s festivities were undoubtedly sponsored by the Russian Federation. We cross-referenced all of the photos taken last night to our database and came up with four hits. Three with suspected ties to the DC consulate and one confirmed to be a consulate employee in New York City. This is going to cause a bit of an international-relations stink.”