The Agency’s training, more tactical than academic, validated many of his methods, and gave new perspective to others. Still, more than once as he listened to the lectures, he felt the Agency’s technique lacked an important second beat. Yes, you showed up unannounced on a target, but you were also quick to say you had to go. You had someplace else to be. That was the special sauce to getting something out of a bad guy. By signaling right out of the box that you were short on time, you put your target at ease. Maybe you even got them to expand on something from a prior meeting. But far more valuable was to get them curious about you. To get your target wondering, Why aren’t you asking me what I’m worried you’ll ask me? Who are you to leave me! Those were the questions you wanted your target to be asking. If you could accomplish that, you got invited back. Which was everything. Getting invited back was all you wanted. More interaction, more meetings, more Facebook messages, more WhatsApp texts. It didn’t matter if the additional communications were porn shots (too often they were) or notes about a kid’s football performance. More was everything. It meant you were getting in.

Klay kept his ideas to himself. It wasn’t his job to give the CIA feedback.

His favorite class was weapons.

He’d touched his first pistol when he was five years old, standing on his tiptoes, feeling his way blindly through his father’s sock drawer in search of Christmas presents. Over the years he got to know all of his father’s hiding places for the handguns he kept stashed throughout the funeral home. His top desk drawer, the electric organ bench. Behind bottles of embalming fluid in the morgue. A pocket sewn into one of the curtains. His nightstand.

Major Thomas introduced him to a few weapons he wasn’t familiar with, and it turned out Klay was still a good shot. His first time at the firing range, Klay put two in the silhouette target’s body, one in the edge of its head. Thomas turned to him and said, “The Mozambique, right?” Klay nodded, pleased he could still pull off what he and his pals used to practice in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Thomas raised his own weapon and delivered ten X-ring shots to the target’s chest. After his third shot his bullets had no paper to hit. He holstered his Sig Sauer and looked at Klay. “You put your man down, son. Fire all you have at center mass, then fire some more. After that I don’t care what you do. Got it?”

Six weeks later Klay was back at his desk, Porfle asking him how his hernia operation had gone.