An embarrassment to the president of the United States would have to be a public event. If it’s not public then he can’t be embarrassed. I imagine what sort of political obstruction Janet might be thinking about and come up with one right away. Gun control is an acutely polarizing issue in this country with the majority of Americans literally up in arms over the prospect of losing their Second Amendment right.

If it ever came out that our government disarmed citizens who then ended up murdered? The fallout would be significant. Such a horrendous story would bring new energy to the battle over gun control. It would galvanize conservative voters. It would become a raging agenda in the upcoming presidential election.

“It’s so fucked up. No matter the truth about Pakistan, about missing guns, about anything, nothing justifies this,” Lucy rants on. “There are better ways to handle it. What they’re doing is personally vindictive and destructive. There’s a child and a dog in this house. What did they ever do to deserve …? Well it’s evil and it isn’t even necessary.”

“That depends on who you ask,” Janet says. “I’m sure to someone it’s necessary.”

“To Erin.”

“Directly, yes it’s necessary to Erin Loria. But this is higher up than her. It’s higher up than Benton. When you’re talking about a cover-up of this magnitude it’s at the cabinet level. It’s agency directors who get involved in ugly lies and conspiracies, the Watergates, the Benghazi disaster not to mention making deals with terrorists, exchanging the release of prisoners at GTMO for a deserter. The U.S. doesn’t need any more humiliations, scandals, botched missions, constitutional violations or casualties, and if the collateral damage is you or me or Desi? If it’s all of us? To DoJ, to DoD, to the White House that’s a nothing price to pay as long as the public doesn’t know. As long as it never gets out.”

What she and Lucy are intimating is egregious beyond comprehension and yet I don’t doubt it could happen. Lucy seems to think that Carrie Grethen has been given an assignment. Or maybe an invitation is a more accurate way to put it if she’s been recruited to kill Lucy, maybe to kill everyone around her. And to make it easy? Let’s leave them on fifty isolated acres with no weapons. Let’s leave them on a remote estate the FBI has vacated and left wide open for an attack that will be interpreted as random, as the lightning strike of a violent psychopath.