She sat in a rented suite of offices in a low-intensity industrial zone just outside of Dearborn, where the MARJORIE DAW working group had rented a building in a warehouse complex by the railroad tracks. All were present, also some technicians and some SWAT officers on loan from the State Police. But they were casually dressed, simply there for the briefing. They wouldn’t go hot until she was in play.

“Mrs. McDowell, can you go over it one more time?” asked Agent Chandler. Chandler, whose cuteness had evolved into serious beauty in the time since she’d worked with Swagger, even if she tried to pretend such a thing could never happen, had been flown in to relate to Mrs. McDowell when all agreed—finally—that Mrs. McDowell was the best option. But it hadn’t been an easy sell for Swagger.

“She’s untrained. You can’t put a civilian in this kind of situation without formal training, and if she slips up, the whole thing goes down,” argued Nick. “On top of that, this is the most highly graded top secret operation we have going. She is not cleared for it and can’t be vetted in time. On top of even that, if the CIA finds out we’re using someone on their nutcase list, they’ll become highly interested, by which I mean irritated, and all sorts of political ramifications could come onto the board that we cannot control.”

Swagger said, “I don’t know nothing about the politics. There shouldn’t be any in this situation, but if there are, let’s pretend there aren’t. It seems to me she can be brought in on the statement that an action against Juba the Sniper is under way, no further details available to her. She will accept that. She wants to be a part of this.”

“You’re not just sentimentalizing things? You’re moved by her, you feel sorry for her—so do I, and who wouldn’t?—but you want to improve her mental health by bringing her in on this and feeling like part of the solution when it is explicitly her amateur status that risks it?”

“Maybe I am. But trying to take my feelings out of it, we’re not sending her in to get the plans for the X11 bomber or to blow up a bridge. She knows mosques, she’s been visiting them for fourteen years. Her job is to determine, as casually as possible, if anything seems out of the ordinary. There are too many mosques, and we do not have enough time to run deeper hunts of each of them. She can save days, maybe weeks, and if we can nail this bird here, think what it’ll mean.”

Gold was agnostic. “I’ve seen cases where passionate amateurs have performed brilliantly. I’ve seen them where they’ve turned triumph into catastrophe. As she’s an American citizen, I will not take a position.”