“She couldn’t have been playing me, Levi. There was nothing to play.”

“Nothing to play? What if Clarice found out?”

“This was before Clarice and I were together.”

“Then why didn’t you tell her about it?”

Lance made to speak, then stopped himself.

“That’s right,” Roth said.

“I don’t think you should be bringing up Clarice,” Lance said.

“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve apologized for what happened,” Roth said. “Believe me, no one was more shocked about it than me. Lance, if I had any idea, you have to believe me, I never would have made that order.”

“You should have spoken to me.”

“I didn’t know if you were in on it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I made a mistake, Lance. I made a mistake that I can never unmake. If that’s going to stop us working together, you might as well tell me right now.”

Lance let out a long sigh. He looked at Roth and asked himself what he felt. It wasn’t hatred. It never had been. Only pain.

“Can we just talk about what we’re going to do?” he said. “Laurel’s down. Tatyana’s down. The least we can do is make sure they didn’t die for nothing.”

“Fine,” Roth said. “Let’s move on.”

“Fine,” Lance said.

“You sure you’re ready?”

“Just get on with it.”

Roth looked at him. “You had an unreported fling with a foreign agent, you basically let the Main Directorate into your bedroom, and then this vial shows up with your name on it.”

Lance shook his head. “Look. If you want to nail me all day long about this, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But the longer we spend talking about it, the more time we waste.”

“So you have no clue why she sent this vial to you, personally, out of all the people she could have sent it to?”

“She needed to get it to someone she trusted.”

“And she trusted you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now she’s dead, and near as we can tell, so is Laurel.”

“Near as you can tell?”

“We’ll get to that.”

“On the phone you made it sound like she was dead.”

“I said we’d get to that.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, your Russian friend…”.

“Don’t call her that.”

“What should I call her?”

“Come on, Levi.”

“The Russian agent,” he said. “Is that better?”

“Yes.”

“The Russian agent gave us the location of a dropbox. Laurel went there to meet her. And something went wrong.”

“What went wrong?”

“A lot of things.”

“What exactly?”

“We haven’t recovered the bodies.”

“Either of them?”

“Laurel was shot in the upper torso. We have drone footage and local witnesses. A man followed the Russian to the meet.”

“He’s the one who shot them?”