There was a boxcutter on the table. She picked it up and turned it so that the light from above caught on the tip of the blade.

“Easy,” Milton said, although there was a smile in his eyes.

She slid the blade beneath the plastic tie that secured his right wrist and sliced through it, then repeated the process on the left-hand restraint. Milton massaged each wrist, one after the other. He smiled and shook his head in amusement.

“What?” she said.

He gestured around the room. “This doesn’t strike you as funny? I don’t even know where I am.”

“We’ll get to that,” she said. She pointed to the reddened abrasions. “You okay?”

“They’ve had me in cuffs ever since they found me in the jungle,” he said.

“The jungle,” Ellie said. “I’m going to need to understand how you’re mixed up in this.”

He exhaled. “It’s a long story.”

She smirked. “You’re not going anywhere until I say so.”

“Fair enough.”

“Why were you there? Are you working?”

“No,” he said.

“I was just thinking—back in Michigan, all I know is that one minute my bosses were looking at investigating your role in what happened to that militia and then, next minute, they weren’t. I was told that there were conversations between governments. High-level shit. That only happens for people with special status. I know people like that—we’ve got some of them down here now.”

“The CIA, you mean?”

“That’d be one example. I would’ve asked you about all that if you hadn’t run out on me.”

“I’m not CIA.”

“MI6?”

He smiled. “No,” he said. “I used to have a security clearance. Can we leave it at that?”

“Not if you’re working down here. I kind of have to know.”

“I’m not working. I retired from that kind of work a long time ago—before Michigan.”

“So you’re here as a civilian? That’s not going to go down well if that’s the line you want to take.”

Milton glanced to the right and frowned. Ellie could see that he was working out what he wanted to say.

“All right,” he said.

“Everything,” she told him.

He nodded. “Everything.”

75

They had arranged the meet at Chadwick’s, a bar and grill on K Street. Control had worked in the intelligence industry for two decades and, as such, was something of an aficionado of classic espionage. She was very well aware that it was in this Washington restaurant, back in 1985, that Aldrich Ames had handed over his dossier of information to his Russian handler in exchange for a bag of cash. She wondered whether the man she had come to meet was aware of that, or whether it was an infelicitous coincidence. She suspected the former.