“There was more.”

“What more?”

“I had the file altered.”

“That much is obvious. You’re hiding something.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But there was a red flag.”

Roth shrugged.

“He’s a nut?” Laurel said.

“No.”

“He went off the deep end?”

“No.”

“You altered the file. Something wasn’t good.”

“He’s not a nut.”

“You stuck your neck out for this guy, and now you’re assigning him to me.”

“I never said that.”

“Why else would you bring me all this way?”

Roth raised his hands. “Fine,” he said.

“I’m just saying, if my life’s about to be tied to this guy, if we’re going to depend on each other completely, and there’s a red flag, something big enough to get you to put him on ice for two years, I think I should know what it is.”

Roth was no idiot. Maybe he spent too much on clothes, and had a weakness for women of a certain type, women young enough to be his granddaughter, but he also had his finger on the pulse of the nation’s security in ways other people could never imagine.

He was the man behind the secret assassinations, the targeted strikes. He was the puppetmaster pulling the strings. He was the one who kept terrorists awake at night.

Sometimes, when Laurel looked at him she saw everything that was wrong with the world. The privileged, white, Anglo-Saxon, relic of a bygone era, a man so used to taking what he wanted he no longer bothered to check it was his. He had never struggled to make rent. He wasn’t judged every time he walked into a room. He certainly didn’t have the hand of someone forty years his senior squeezing his ass.

But every once in a while, she saw something in him. A man didn’t get where Roth was by accident. He knew what he was doing. And he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Other men would have buckled under the pressure.

Roth cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “Spector is a trained assassin. He’s received more training than anyone on earth. Certainly more than anyone the government is aware of.”

“Right,” Laurel said.

“And he’s killed a lot of people for this country. Before I even found him the body count was piling up. After I recruited him it only got higher.”

Laurel nodded.

“There’s a lot of blood on his hands,” Roth said.

“I know.”

“I mean, you could fill a graveyard.”

“I get it,” Laurel said, impatient to hear where this was going. “He likes it too much,” she said. “Got too much of a taste for it.”

“No,” Roth said.

“What then?”

“A man like him. You know what makes him different?”

Laurel wanted to shake it out of him. “Tell me,” she said.

“The perfect killer. You know what makes him stand out?”