Janson shook his head, smiling, as if Harnett had said something funny, and made his way to the door. Just before he left the office, he stopped and turned. “One tip, though—gratis,” he said. “Your wife knows.” It would have been indelicate to say the name of Harnett’s Venezuelan mistress, so Janson simply added, obliquely but unmistakably: “About Caracas, I mean.” Janson gave him a meaningful look: no judgment implied; he was, speaking as one professional to another, merely identifying a potential point of vulnerability.

Small red spots appeared on Harnett’s cheeks, and he seemed stricken with nausea: it was the look of a man contemplating a ruinously expensive divorce on top of a proxy fight he was likely to lose. “I’m willing to talk stock options,” he called after Janson.

But the consultant was already making his way down the hall toward the elevator bank. He had not minded seeing the blowhard squirm; by the time he reached the lobby, though, he was filled with a sense of sourness, of time wasted, of a larger futility.

A voice from so long ago—another life—echoed faintly in his head. And this is what gives meaning to your life? Phan Nguyen asked that, in a thousand different ways. It was his favorite question. Janson could see, even now, the small, intelligent eyes; the broad, weathered face; the slender, childlike arms. Everything about America seemed to engage his interrogator’s curiosity, with equal parts fascination and revulsion. And this is what gives meaning to your life? Janson shook his head: Doom on you, Nguyen.

As Janson stepped into his limousine, which had been idling on Dearborn just outside the building’s lobby, he decided to go straight to O’Hare; there was an earlier flight to Los Angeles he could catch. If only Nguyen’s questions could be as easily left behind.

Two uniformed women were standing behind a counter as he entered the Platinum Club lounge of Pacifica Airlines. The uniforms and the counter were both the same blue-gray hue. The women’s jackets featured the sort of epaulets to which the major airlines were so devoted. In another place and time, Janson reflected, they would have rewarded extensive battlefield experience.

One of the women had been speaking to a jowly, heavyset man who wore an open blue blazer and a beeper clipped to his belt. A glint of badge metal from his inside coat pocket told Janson that he was an FAA inspector, no doubt taking his break where there was human scenery to be enjoyed. They broke off when Janson stepped forward.

“Your boarding card, please,” the woman said, turning to him. She had a powdery tan that ended somewhere below her chin, and the kind of brassy hair that came from an applicator tip.

Janson flashed his ticket and the plastic card with which Pacifica rewarded its extremely frequent fliers.

“Welcome to the Pacifica Platinum Club, Mr. Janson,” the woman twinkled.