Stone ate his breakfast, read the Times, and got to his desk a bit later than usual. Felicity hadn’t called. His stomach announced the approach of noon, and he felt like getting out of the house. He took a cab to the Upper East Side, to a town house in the Sixties housing a club he had been elected to the year before. The place had no name; it was referred to by most of its members as “the place on the East Side,” and Stone had not used it much since he and Dino had been elected to membership, Dino first. The cab deposited him on the sidewalk a couple of doors down from the house, and he walked the last few steps to the front door.

He had put a hand out for the door handle when the door, anticipating him, silently opened and closed behind him. A man at a desk inside said, “Good day, Mr. Barrington,” indicating to Stone that something had recognized him as he entered, because he didn’t know the man at the desk.

He took the elevator to the top-floor restaurant and emerged into a room lit by the sun through skylights and a wall of French doors that opened onto a roof garden. He decided to sit outside and stopped at the bar there and ordered a Buck’s fizz, as the British and the club bartender called a mimosa—half orange juice, half champagne. He took a seat at the bar and surveyed the roof garden. Familiar faces from the business community, the arts, and politics dotted the crowd. A man approached the bar and took a stool a couple down from Stone.

“Good morning, Stone,” the man said, and Stone turned to find the senior senator from New York, Everett Salton, sitting there.

“Good morning, Ev,” Stone replied. He had met the man only a couple of times, but he recalled the warmth and bonhomie the man exuded. He had managed to make himself seem, on first meeting, like an old friend.

“Funny I should bump into you,” Salton said. “Just got off a helicopter twenty minutes ago after a closed hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Your name came up.”

Stone was sorry to hear it. “I hope it was not taken in vain,” he said.

“Aspersions were cast, but I did what I could to soften them.”

“I can’t imagine why a closed session of an important committee would be bandying my name about when I feel so perfectly innocent of doing anything that might offend them in the slightest degree.”

“An innocent heart is a perfect shield,” Salton said. “I would attribute the quote, but I made it up only just now.”

“You have the soul of a poet, Ev.”

“You are not the first to notice,” the senator replied with a small smile.