Evan says, “Can I pet him?”

“Strider can be touchy. Let him get used to you.”

Their shoes crunch pleasingly in the tall grass. They make their way up a slight hill, and the view is all leafy canopy and fields.

“What are we doing?” Evan asks.

“Walking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’re deciding if we’re gonna like each other or not.”

Evan’s training begins the next day, a test of will that puts the previous ones to shame. At knifepoint in a dark barn, he learns his destiny. His future is illuminated, each revelation like a burst of fireworks.

To the world and even to his own instructors, he will be known only as Orphan X.

As his handler, Jack accompanies him to every session. There is breaching and shooting and hand-to-hand, psyops and spycraft and espionage technology. Evan generally returns home exhausted and bloodied. Their days are regimented.

In the evenings they set up in the study, just them and a framed photo of a woman, which rests alone on a side table. She has waist-long hair, a slender neck, and thick-framed eyeglasses from another decade. Evan sneaks glances at her now and then when Jack’s not looking. They read a lot, mostly biographies and history books. Evan finds them boring until Jack talks about them, and then the stories come to life. They listen to classical-music records, too. One night an opera is playing in the background as Evan tries to decipher a chapter about Thomas Jefferson.

Jack’s voice interrupts the music. “Do you hear that?”

When Evan looks up, he sees that Jack’s eyes are closed. The opera singer wails ever louder.

“Nine high C’s. When Pavarotti sang this aria at the Met on February seventeenth, 1972, he had seventeen curtain calls. Seventeen.”

Evan does not know what an aria is, or the Met, or a curtain call. So he asks, “Were you there?”

“No.”

Evan hesitates. “Where were you?”

Jack closes the book around his thumb. The textured skin around his eyes shifts a bit as he seems to decide whether or not to answer. “Laos,” he says.

With this response Evan senses they have broken through onto new terrain, and this is at once exciting and perilous. He ponders a reply, but even rehearsed in his head the words sound clumsy.

He dares to gesture toward the tarnished silver frame. “How’d she die? Your wife?”

Jack says, “An embassy bombing. In Kuwait.”

“Was she a spy?”

“She was a secretary.”

“Oh.” Evan waits until Jack’s attention returns to his book. He hesitates, unsure how to proceed in this foreign tongue, the strange language of intimacy. Then he says, “Her eyes are friendly.”

Jack’s gaze stays fixed on the book. “Thank you, Evan,” he says, in a voice even more gravelly than usual.