“It’s a gun in my pocket,” he said, cutting her off. “Let me tell you something. I was once like you. A weapon. Aimed and discharged by someone else. I thought I had an autonomous intelligence, made my own decisions. The truth was otherwise: I was a weapon in the hands of another.”

“That’s just a bunch of word music as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “I’m into specifics, not generalities.”

“Fine.” He took a deep breath, dredging up an old memory. “A penetration identified in Stockholm … .”

He could picture the man now. Blunt, pudgy features, a soft-in-the-middle, sedentary soul. And scared, so scared. Dark smudges under his eyes spoke of sleeplessness and exhaustion. Through Janson’s scope, those features formed a rictus of anxiety; the subject made quiet popping noises with his lips, an absurd, nervous tic. Why so scared, if this was a typical contact? He had seen such contacts, men going about their business, making a dead drop, the twentieth or thirtieth dead drop of the year, with a bored and vacant expression. This man’s face was different—filled with self-loathing and fear. And when the Swede turned toward the other man, the putative Russian contact, his face read not greed or gratitude but repugnance.

“Stockholm,” she said. “May of 1983. You witnessed the subject make contact with the KGB control, and took him out. For a nonspecialist, it was a pretty neat shot: from an apartment rooftop to a park bench two blocks away.”

“Stop the tape,” he said. Her knowledge of these things was unnerving. “You’ve described it as I did in my report. Yet how did I know he was a penetration agent? I’d been told he was. And the KGB agent? I recognized the face, but that, too, was a datum I’d been provided with by operations control. What if it were wrong?”

“You mean he wasn’t KGB.”

“In fact, he was. Sergei Kuzmin was his name. But the man who met with him was frightened, blackmailed into the meeting. He had no interest in providing the KGB with anything useful. He was going to try to persuade the man that he had nothing further to offer, that his diplomatic rank was too low to make him a valuable asset. He was going to tell him to buzz off, damn the consequences.”

“How do you know?”

“I spoke to his wife. That wasn’t part of my mission instructions.”

“That’s so random, man. And how did you know she spoke the truth?”

“I just did,” he responded, shrugging. It was not a question that a highly experienced field agent would have to ask. “Tutored intuition, call it. It’s not a hundred percent reliable—but accurate enough.”

“How come this wasn’t part of your report?”