She went to the door, took a breath, and opened it. In the full light of the office, she was appalled at what she was seeing. She hadn’t been face-to-face with him in perhaps three weeks, which made the transformation all the more extraordinary. He must have lost twenty pounds. His face, always narrow, was sunken, his eyes deep and inlooking. He pulled a handkerchief out of a side pocket and wiped his brow so hard it looked as if he were trying to clean off a stain. He wore one of his two-thousand-dollar suits, but it hung on him and was dirty, obviously slept in. His gray shirt was open. And this in a man who had always been almost absurdly fastidious. He used to smell like cologne. Now he smelled like sour, old sweat.

“Change of policy,” he said.

“We did what we had to do.”

He dropped into a chair. Were there tears at the edges of his eyes?

“I know what you did.”

“And you disagree. You’re here to lodge a protest.”

His face changed, and she saw something else, an unidentifiable tangle of emotions. What was this—the face of a spurned lover, a paranoid, a dying man? A cruel face, certainly.

“He’s a slick bastard,” he said, his voice as smooth as velvet. He leaned toward her. “Hit him. Hit him hard, Gina.”

Now, this did surprise her. “Hit who?”

He snorted out a laugh. “I have some information for you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Your lover—that remarkable boy—is not onside.”

Fear does predictable things. It makes you still, and she became as still as a cornered animal. It dries your mouth, and hers became sand. It makes you cold, and she shuddered. Dangerously, it can slow thought and impair thought, and she told herself to guard against this. She told her training to kick in now. Step back, maintain perspective.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, trying to keep both the lilt of false unconcern and the tremor of fear firmly suppressed.

“I’ve wasted a lot of time because of him,” he muttered. He made a constricted, chopping gesture. “No more.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Doctor?”

His eyes seemed to seek some inner destination. “Do you understand what happened out there?”

“We laid down a small air strike, mostly to incinerate the remains of Captain Massengill before some local came along. Now there’s been an escalation, obviously.”

Instead of responding to this, he shifted his eyes away from hers. What was he concealing? She was having difficulty understanding. There was a lot she did not know, that much was clear. But in a highly classified project such as this, “need to know” was a constant issue.

“Maybe I need to know.”

“What?”

“Whatever you’re not saying.”

“That’s quite a system you’ve got there.” He gestured weakly toward her bank of screens.

“Thank you.”

“So use the goddamn thing!”