Six weeks later, Krieger’s people rode in on big South African armored personnel carriers called Mambas, firing PK machine guns, and wiped the rebels out. Two hundred more people died. As payment, Perseus Group took a half share in Kisie’s mining operations, which Klay was sure had been Krieger’s strategy from the beginning. No one reported either of the massacres. He had not reported them. Kisie was just another African insurgency put down. Perseus Group was outside of scope. And now he worked for the man.

Ever since Krieger’s hologram event, Klay’s nightmares had become more frequent and more intense. He had been reliving the accident in Indonesia on and off for more than a decade. Bernard’s murder had twisted itself into that nightmare. And both of these deaths were threads woven into the formative tragedy in his life, which had shaped him and his dreams since he was a child. A child who had witnessed his mother’s murder.

No. He would not work for Terry Krieger. His work for the CIA was over, too.

He pressed the small black doorbell.

By the time he left this building, he’d be free to press the reset button on his life. What that meant, he didn’t yet know. He could always become an embalmer, lay people out in a box again instead of on the page. He could write obits—charming little tales about men and women who’d led surprising, underappreciated lives. Buy a house “down the shore,” as they said back home, finally get that Chesapeake Bay retriever, find a lover, lead a charming, underappreciated life of his own.

The door opened. An older black man in a waiter’s uniform greeted him.

“Hello, Arno,” Klay said.

“Good evening, Mr. Klay. Mr. Eady’s expecting you upstairs.”

•   •   •

The club’s charter hung just inside the door.

To foster mutual improvement, education, and enlightenment, convivial men the world over find pleasure and recreation in association with others like minded to relieve the spirit of what some call the monotony of domestic life and the routine and toil of business. The Club provides its members with a place to confess what they would not share with wives or family . . .

“No women then,” Klay said, reading it on his first visit to Eady’s club.

“They say Pamela Harriman made herself an exception, but no,” Eady said. “No women.” The lower hall and stairwell were lined with portraits of the club’s past members. Eady pointed some out as they walked. “Theodore, not Franklin,” he said of the Roosevelts. “The man himself,” introduced Major General William J. Donovan. Brown Brothers Harriman, the Goldman Sachs of its day, was well represented over the years. “Some of the Wise Men,” Eady continued, indicating Harriman, Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and John J. McCloy—“another Philadelphia man and a friend.” Eady winked. “Ford—no, by the way,” he said of Nixon.

“A lot of old white men,” Klay said.