FBI Director Dunning Dies of Stroke in Rome.

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Fenwick’s on 13th Street across from Franklin Square had a gleaming mahogany bar and tufted leather banquettes and waiters who wore white tuxedo jackets even at breakfast service.

It was always ranked in the top five of DC’s oldest and most highly regarded establishment institutions. The joke was that the old Fenwick waiters had served not just Washington’s senators but also the actual Washington Senators, the black-and-white-TV-era American League baseball team that had been disbanded in 1971.

At a quarter after nine in the morning, Reyland sat center court, smoothing down his silk Hermès tie between the bespoke lapels of his best Hackett of London navy suit. He glanced to his left, where Emerson sat looking the way he had ordered him to, neat and lean and preppy and highly polished.

Prep School, he thought, glancing at him, pleased. He hired only people who could pull off that throwback J. Edgar Hoover FBI look.

He looked around the room ever so casually. He usually did his power noshing at the Hayes across from the J. Edgar Building on E Street, but he needed to be seen in the legend seats now that he was a shoo-in for deputy director.

And so far, his PR appearance seemed to be coming off pretty well. He’d been there only ten minutes before the UN ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament had come by to kiss his ring as well as the senior adviser to policy planning at State. Richie Dempsey, the famous four-hundred-pound owner of the legendary eatery, had waddled out of the kitchen to say hello and even his hardcase elderly mother had texted as he was leaving the house to give him a rare upvote for his debut appearance on the front page of the New York Times.

That wasn’t even the best news, he thought, as he dabbed some country ham into the yolk of his perfectly runny poached egg.

Last night, Ruiz’s Mexican contractor had finally broken the diver.

As they had already been theorizing, the diver, Stephen Vance, had in fact copied a backup video of the dive onto his phone. Not only that, as they had also been theorizing, Vance had indeed shown the video to the female naval inspector, Ruby Everett, who had left the base.

That the diver had done this was quite troubling now that the cat had been let out of the bag about Dunning.

But the good news was that Vance hadn’t given her the video. They had done a full forensic on his mobile phone, and the video of the dive had not been uploaded to anyone.

So in essence, there was no proof. The leak was still very much sealable.

It was now just a matter of picking up the naval inspector, some surprisingly attractive hick nobody out of Ohio coal country named Ruby Everett.

Ruby, the rube, was out on leave to points unknown, but that wasn’t going to be a problem since his team had been on it since three this morning.