Roth nodded but didn’t say anything. He was silent for the rest of the ride into the city.

When they finally pulled up outside Laurel’s apartment she looked at him. She felt sorry for him. He looked like he’d aged ten years in the time it took them to drive home from the airport.

“Good night, boss,” she said, getting out of the car.

“Get some sleep,” he said.

She looked back. “I wish we got Lance.”

“We gave it our best shot.”

Laurel wanted to say something else, something comforting, but she couldn’t think of anything.

Geopolitics was a giant chess game to him, and this envelope, the vial, the message for Spector, it changed everything. His job, the job of the entire CIA, was above all else to preserve the status quo. This virus, it changed the position of every piece on the board. It threatened the entire game. Ever since 1949, when Stalin successfully tested his own version of the twenty-kiloton Fat Man, the global chess board, to a mind like Roth’s, had changed not at all.

Now, it had been upended in a single stroke.

“We’ve still got the mailbox,” Laurel said.

Roth nodded. “Look into it in the morning,” he said through the window of the car as it pulled away.

Laurel saw the world differently than Roth did. To her, it wasn’t a chess board. It was personal. And she intended to look into the mailbox lead very closely indeed.

She waited for Roth’s car to round the corner then began walking, not to her apartment but to the closest metro station. She caught the metro to Union Station and bought a ticket to New York on the last train of the night.

She got a little sleep on the train, an hour or two, and was in Penn Station by midnight. From there she caught a cab to Bleeker and Tenth in the Village.

She stepped from the cab into the cool New York night. It felt good to be in the city in December. It had an energy unlike anywhere else on earth.

She pulled her phone from her pocket and called Langley, where she was connected to one of the specialists on night duty.

“It’s Laurel.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Do you have contact with the surveillance detail on the mailbox?”

“Sure, why?”

“I’m a block away. Tell them I’m paying a visit.”

The phone clicked and when the specialist came back he said, “There’s a gray van across the street from the store.”

Laurel was walking in that direction and could see the van. “Are they expecting me?”

“Yeah, they see you.”

The back door of the van opened and Laurel got in.

“Gentlemen,” she said.