Justin was watching him carefully. Paul realized that the needle had been inserted on purpose. Justin was probably trying to make him feel vulnerable, to throw him off-balance.

This meant only one thing: this was not a conversation. It was not a report. It was an interrogation and he was in trouble. The question was, what the hell kind?

“Well, Paul?”

“Justin, I don’t know what to say. I don’t like your drift. ‘Want me to feel it’—what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You lose agents!”

“I’m fighting a war!”

“You and Don Quixote. We’re not sure about your war.”

“The White House is bothering the director, and you’re taking heat. Is that it?”

Justin did not reply, confirming the accuracy of Paul’s diagnosis.

“Tell ’em they have no need to know. Like the alien business.”

“The alien business! We don’t exactly have a directive from another world enforcing the secrecy in this particular case, Paul. All we have is you.”

“Thing is, how did the White House find out in the first place?”

“The French have a program. The Germans have a program. For all I know, everybody has a program. This is a secret that’s about to come out. And they are scared, because when that press conference has to be called, they will have to explain you and your killing spree, and they don’t know how to do that.”

“I’ve done my job. The French have done theirs. No doubt the others have, too. We’ve been effective. End of story.”

“Yeah, the French have a casualty rate of seventy percent. You’ve lost four out of eleven people in two years. That’s very effective, but not in the way we want, Paulie Paul.”

“Everybody loses personnel. I saw the French clean out dozens of vampires when I was there.”

“We prefer to call them differently blooded persons. DBPs.”

He did not like the drift of that. “Who decided this?”

“The Human Rights Directorate.” Justin shuffled more paper. “I printed out their memo for you.”

“I didn’t know we had a Human Rights Directorate.”

“It’s attached to the Office of the General Counsel. It was mandated under PD 1482 a year ago.”

Presidential Directive 1482 had established humane practices guidelines for the Directorate of Operations. Since Paul was not dealing with human beings, humane practices, he had assumed, were not relevant to his work.

Justin held the paper out to him. “We’ve been instructed to use these guidelines as the basis for a policy recommendation. We’re assembling facts for the Directorate of Intelligence now.”

Paul took the sheet of paper. “Who wrote this?”

Justin did not answer directly. “Read it.”