Unlike their titular superiors, they were not political appointees; they were lifers, tending to programs that extended far beyond the duration of any particular administration. They liaised with, and reported to, the men and women who shuttled in and out in four-year cycles, but the horizons of their responsibilities, as they conceived them, extended much further.

Sitting opposite the DIA man, the deputy director of the National Security Agency had a high scrubbed forehead and small, pinched features. He prided himself on maintaining an outward air of serenity, no matter what the circumstances. That air of serenity was now close to fraying, and with it his pride. “Secrecy, yes—the nature of the directive is clear,” he said quietly. “The nature of our subject is not.”

“Paul Elie Janson,” said the State Department undersecretary, who was, on paper, the director of that department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He had not spoken for some time. A smooth-faced, athletic man with tousled, straw-colored hair, he was lent gravitas by heavy black-framed glasses. The undersecretary was a survivor, the other men knew. And because he was a survivor, they took careful note of the way he positioned himself on the issues. “Janson was one of ours, as you know. The documents you’ve got on him are lightly redacted. Apologies for that—that’s the way they come out of the files, and we didn’t have much prep time. Anyway, I think they give you the general idea.”

“One of your goddamn killing machines, Derek, that’s what he is,” said Albright, glowering at the undersecretary. Despite Albright’s high administrative rank, he had spent a career in analysis, not operations, and he remained an analyst to the core of his being. The ingrained mistrust that men of his ilk had toward their counterparts in operations was too often justified. “You create these soulless pieces of machinery, loose them on the world, and then leave someone else to clean up the mess. I just don’t understand what kind of game he’s playing.”

The man from State flushed angrily. “Have you considered the possibility that someone is running a game on him?” A hard stare: “Jumping to conclusions could be dangerous. I’m not willing to stipulate that Janson is a renegade.”

“The point is, we can’t be certain,” the NSA man, Sanford Hildreth, said after a while. He turned to the man seated next to him, a computer scientist who, as a young man, had earned a reputation as a wunderkind when he almost single-handedly redesigned the primary intelligence database for the CIA. “Is there some data set we’re overlooking, Kaz?”