“Let’s start with Mick McMunchun, since that’s where it starts for you. It looked like we might have another Jeffrey Epstein. Underage girls. Important men. We were keeping tabs on him, just trying to be sure that we got ahead of things before things got ahead of us. We stumbled over Elizabeth Bloom Carter trying to develop a murder-for-hire scheme. Then you came into the picture. Then he was dead.”

“It sounds like you were wire-tapping her.”

He shrugged.

“I hope you were,” I said. “Then you’ll have plenty of exculpatory material. I told her over and over again, I was explicit, that my goal was information, or in the case of Kaylee, physical rescue. Never murder for hire.”

“We didn’t mind.”

“That they were willing to pay to have him killed? That I’m in fact innocent of the murder-for-hire scheme?”

“That McMunchun was dead. He was going to be a problem. It might have bothered us that Cohen was dead. But we’re pretty sure he’d murdered his partner. We didn’t know if he’d go down for that, so his death didn’t bother us much either. In the grand scheme of things, some might even think that justice was done. More to the point, we couldn’t quite pin that one on you, anyway.

“Then came Voloshin. We wanted to get him. But we couldn’t. Worse, if we did, we didn’t think we’d get away with it. But you did.”

“I saw you there, in Lech, didn’t I? With that hat?”

“Yes.”

“How were you there? You had to be listening in on Elizabeth.”

“Yes. Her secure room, the one that nobody can listen in on. One of her builders is one of ours, and the place is wired like the old U.S. Embassy in Moscow was by the Russians when we were foolish enough to use Russian workers to build it. Had to tear it down and rebuild it with stones from Minnesota.”

“You know what she wants to do,” I paused and didn’t actually say murder husbands. “And you’re going to let her?”

He sighed. He looked thoughtful. “So far,” he said, “her targets have been OK with us.” He gave a sort of shrug. Then shifted to a positive spin. “Also, she’s opening avenues that we would never have thought of. I suppose that at some point she’s going to make bad choices and we’ll have to revisit things. But for now…”

“Who exactly are you…as a group?”

“I can’t go into details. I can promise you that if you ever feel a certain specific action or target is a problem, you’ll be able to ask about that. You could think about it this way, horizontally you have clearance and a clear view, but vertically, up the chain, you don’t. That’s how it has to be.”