Janson paid him a visit not long afterward. In the - attempt to gain entrée to the shadowy world of these terrorist organizations, he searched for people whose fealty to civilization might not have completely eroded—people who were not yet dead to so-called bourgeois morality. Barry Cooper’s association with those organizations always struck him as odd; he knew his file well, and what he saw was someone who was essentially a joker, a cutup, a clown, rather than a killer. A get-along go-along guy who had found himself getting along and going along with some very bad company.

Cooper was already living in Amsterdam, in the very same houseboat, making a living selling colorful sketches of the old town to tourists—kitsch, but sincere kitsch. He had the affect of someone who had smoked too much pot for too long a time: even when he wasn’t stoned, he had a slightly unfocused and ingenuous manner. The two men did not bond right away: it was hard to imagine two souls less alike. Still, Cooper finally appreciated that his visitor from the U.S. government tried neither to ingratiate himself nor to make threats. He looked like a jarhead but he didn’t come on like one. Oddly low-key in his approach, he played it straight. When Cooper diverted the conversation to the inequities of the West, Janson, as a trained political scientist, was happy to follow him. Rather than jeering at his politics, Janson was happy to concede that there was much to criticize in the Western democracies—but then rejected the dehumanizing simplifications of the terrorists in direct, hard-hitting language. Our society betrays humanity whenever it doesn’t live up to its own expressed ideals. And the world your friends wish to create? It betrays humanity whenever it does live up to its expressed ideals. Was the choice so hard?

That’s deep, Barry Cooper had said, sincerely. That’s deep: the reflexive rejoinder of the shallow. But if Cooper were shallow, his very shallowness had saved him from the worst temptations of the revolutionary left. And his information proved to be the undoing of dozens of violent cells. Their safe houses were shut down, their leaders imprisoned, their sources of funding identified and rooted out. The pothead in the funky blue houseboat had helped to do that. In that respect, the posturing, hard-hearted spokesmen of the revolutionary vanguards had it right: sometimes a small man can make a big difference.

In return, the State Department quietly desisted in its attempts to seek extradition.

Now Janson sipped hot coffee from a mug that still bore smudges of acrylic paint.

“I know you’re here just to hang,” Cooper said. “I know you don’t, like, want something from me.” It was banter that survived from their first interviews, a quarter century ago.

“Hey,” Janson said. “OK if I crash here for a while?”