How he’d loved expressing amazement at the name of his component. How he’d loved helping her, taking her to the directory in the lobby. See, he’d told her, Media Exploitation Component Services isn’t there. She’d looked right in his eyes and not seen him for what he was.

These were the subtleties of his life. The ones he enjoyed.

The rest of it—farming out hard cases to Egyptian or Jordanian electroshock, humiliating the captured at Gitmo, scooping up the innocent with the damned—these were strategic, but the dead opposite of subtle, and never satisfying. They were only sometimes effective. They could be useful, but only as long as they were hidden. These days, there were too many grunts with digital cameras, too many cell-phone photographers, too many happy-at-home moralists. He didn’t blame any of them. He rarely hated them. He just wished they were a little bit more like this Vera Hastings.

He could still see her taillights. She was turning onto I-66.

She was an appealing example of the worthy opponent, the by-the-rules adversary.

He used to be that. Then he only advocated for it. Now he preached its setbacks. In a better world, he would still be just like her. In today’s world, he could only recognize his values from a distance and remember the reverence he once had for them.

There, the last red lights had vanished. As if synchronized, his phone burst into loud rings. He looked at the readout. It was the vice-president’s man, Rood Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control.

“Will.”

“Rood.”

“We have news.”

“Wait. What’s the NIE situation?” The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

“It’s still circulating.”

“Good. It should be.”

“Losing your asset made monkeys out of us. But that’s why my news—listen—I …”

“The solution is to declassify the key judgments of the estimates.”

“Will—that’s right, that’s what we agreed. But—”

“But what?”

“My mole at NSA,” Rood said. To get through bureaucracy, the vice-president’s staff and confederates had moles, what they called “trusteds,” inside key agencies. He got information quicker than through official channels. Having information before you were supposed to have it was equivalent to having power. Will didn’t always approve of it. He didn’t much like the vice-president. He certainly had problems with everyone on his staff. Rood Joseph—merely a vice-president believer, not his staffer—was the least objectionable acolyte of the Mean Man. Mean Man—that was what most everyone at MECS called the vice-president.

“There’re some intercepts out of Tehran,” Rood continued. “It’s quite clear now. Your asset is very much alive.”

Hoseyn.

“They heard him talking?”

“They heard chatter about him that made it virtually certain he was alive,” Rood said.

Chatter. Oh, that.