An urge to strike Laurel swelled. Or to lash out with cruel words about her short stature, wide hips, excessive makeup, her parents’ bankruptcy, her failed love life—a deduction but surely accurate. Metzger’s anger had inflicted only a half dozen bruises or welts over the years; his words had hurt legions. The Smoke did that. The Smoke made you inhuman.

Just leave.

He turned.

Laurel said evenly, “And what’s Rashid’s crime—saying things about America you didn’t like? Asking people to question the values and the integrity of the country?…But isn’t being free to ask questions like that what America’s all about?”

Metzger stopped fast, turned and snapped, “Spoken like the most simple-minded, cliché-ridden of bloggers.” He reseated himself in front of her. “What is it with you? Why do you resent what we do so much?”

“Because what you do is wrong. The United States is a country of laws, not men.”

“‘Government’ of laws,” he corrected. “John Adams. It’s a nice-sounding phrase. But parse it and things aren’t so simple. A government of laws. Okay. Think about that: Laws require interpretation and delegations of power, down and down the line. To people like me—who make decisions on how to implement those laws.”

She fired back with: “Laws don’t include ignoring due process and executing citizens arbitrarily.”

“There’s nothing arbitrary about what I do.”

“No? You kill people you think are going to commit an offense.”

“All right, Counselor. What about a policeman on the street? He sees a perp in a dark alley with what might be a gun. It seems that he’s about to shoot someone. The cop is authorized to kill, right? Where’s your due process there, where’s your reasonable search and seizure, where’s your right to confront your accuser?”

“Ah, but Moreno didn’t have a gun.”

“And sometimes the guy in the alley only has a cell phone. But he gets shot anyway because we’ve chosen to give the police the right to make judgments.” He gave a deep, chill laugh. “Tell me, aren’t you guilty of the same thing?”

“What do you mean?” she snapped.

“What about my due process? What about Barry Shales’s?”

She frowned.

He continued, “In making the case, did you datamine me? Or Barry? Did you get classified information from, say, the FBI? Did you somehow ‘accidentally’ happen to get your hands on NSA intercepts?”

An awkward hesitation. Was she blushing beneath the white mask? “Every bit of evidence I present at trial can pass Fourth Amendment scrutiny.”

Metzger smiled. “I’m not talking about trial. I’m talking about unwarranted gathering of information as part of an investigation.”

Laurel blinked. She said nothing.

He whispered, “You see? We both interpret, we judge, we make decisions. We live in a gray world.”