The plane floats down the Potomac River basin and lands. Time to get to his hotel.

He goes onto automatic pilot. So many repetitions.… He’s become chief errand boy at LSR for this kind of thing, sent to Washington about twenty times a year to put out one fire after another. (Off the plane, into the terminal. He’s refined his luggage to a single flight bag, and goes straight out to the taxi line.) From all these more-or-less diplomatic assignments you might guess he was a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, someone who could pal around with the flyboys and drink away their objections. Not so: Dennis McPherson is a reserved man, with a contained manner that can make people nervous. (Into a taxi, off to the Crystal City Hyatt Regency. Traffic bumpertobumper on George Washington Parkway lower level.) He can handle his end of dinner talk as well as the next man; he just isn’t into a bonhomie that in this context has to be transparent and false always, and therefore offputting. This is big business, after all, the biggest business: defense. Why even pretend that your favorite buddy is some Air Force jock you have to deal with?

Into the Crystal City Hyatt Regency, a big irregular space filled with mirrors, escalators, cascading fountains of water and light, walls of glossy greenery, hanging elevators, overhanging balconies. He threads the maze without a thought and checks in, goes up to his room. Into the chrome-and-white-tile bathroom, to stare into the darkened mirror, perhaps clean up a bit before the day’s work.

Pink freckled skin. He needs a shave. Strawberry-blond hair, as Lucy always calls it, receding from a round Irish forehead. Cold blue eyes and deep vertical creases between his eyebrows; he’s a stocky stubborn figure, one of those smoldering Irish who don’t say much, and now he looks harried, tired, annoyed. It’s going to be a tough day.

Strange how it’s come to this. McPherson began as an engineer—damn it, he is an engineer. He has a degree in aerospace engineering from Cal Tech, and even though he’s hopelessly off the edge these days, he can still follow it when his design people describe things. And McPherson can see the larger patterns, where engineering touches both invention and administration. But management itself? … Other program managers got there on leadership, they know how to coax or bully extra results out of their teams. McPherson’s boss Stewart Lemon is a perfect example of this type, the Dynamic Leader of the business schools. McPherson leaves that kind of Napoleonic style to others, and in fact he despises it in Lemon. For his part, he just figures out what has to be done, and lays it out. Low-keyed approach. (Shower, shave.) No, it’s not leadership that got him out of engineering and into administration.