Griffin Huntsmen was a complex, ambitious, and driven sociopath—the last, a fact that the CIA had failed to determine during his screening, which included a lengthy background investigation and a full psychological profile complete with an interview with a psychologist. Unfortunately, the assessment tools had failed to illuminate the dark inner workings that drove him because he’d become an expert in compartmentalizing that part of himself off from the world. Ultimately, the same character trait that made him a valuable asset was also his greatest vulnerability, but he failed to see it that way. To Griffin, it was a strength, hiding one’s true emotions, desires, and intentions. That alone would not have raised the red flags, but the fact that he felt no empathy toward others and successfully disguised it would have.

But it was too late by the time he’d applied to the agency, as the emotional and psychological abuse that he’d sustained at the hands of his father had shaped his worldview and distorted it beyond repair. When he failed to take the trash out exactly when his father wanted it, he suffered a beating. When he got anything other than an A in any subject in school, he suffered a beating. When he asked the wrong question, he suffered a beating. Years later, in college, after his father had died, Griffin would describe him as the world’s greatest practitioner in negative reinforcement.

By the time he entered the agency, he was beyond salvation, and the only lens he looked through was one of cause and effect. The effect was always defined by his unspoken ambition—to be the youngest director of the National Clandestine Service in the agency’s history. The cause was anything—mission, task, or other—that brought him closer to achieving his objective, which was why he’d entered SAD and quickly become a team chief, running missions with little to no guidance other than headquarters’ desired end state. He described his philosophy to Zachary, Charles, and Noah with one brief statement: “They tell us what they want done, and we do it.” Simple as that. And his team had, mission after mission, from Afghanistan to South America, from insurgent HVTs to cartel leaders. Some enemy of the great American republic always had to be captured or killed, and it was his sworn oath to fulfill that requirement. More importantly, to the compartmented core of Griffin Huntsmen, each mission was an incremental step toward his end state. The trick was to make the agency see it that way, especially when the powers that be were notorious for their determination to remain unsatisfied at the expense of their workforce.