One says, “Come on.” She hears the crease-crack of the car door. They put her in the front, on a lap. They weren’t all brothers. One, he’s driving. Says, “We understand you have a friend.”

Something about the tone, it makes her say, “Oh yes, sir. I have a friend.”

“Little friend. Small little friend,” he says. She notices he has a beard, long hair. Another thing: sober.

“Little?” she says, but it’s not a real question.

They wait too, a carful of men—she can smell their hair gel and shoes, a rubbery scent.

Tykes would have said anything, something. Winnow, what she does is remember. How, one night, Mama in the living room, three men, maybe more, through a keyhole. How it was soft. You remember a soft like that in Blagden Alley, when Mama was home with her circumstances. Business, in point of fact, but at the time, Winnow couldn’t put a name on it. Mama’s things at night—that’s what Winnow would have called them if she’d told anyone about them. She didn’t.

Her head’s back in the car with the brothers. “Over here,” she hears one say.

The car door opens from the inside. Something must have gone down, but she missed it, maybe while she was thinking of that keyhole. Could they have said something? Even asked her another question? Could she have answered?

She didn’t know what made her snap out of it, but she did, the moment she heard the engine hesitate. It was a sound like they’d put wrong gas in it. She knew that sound too. Her mama only ever had low-test for the cars that need high-test. When the police came the first time in her life, she was surprised she couldn’t describe a single one of the men she saw through the keyhole that night. This night, she got it. It was a dark-blue Grand Am, Virginia plates, T9P 112.

Mary arrived at National Airport from Nellis at 0800, after taking a commercial red-eye. She’d completed months of training, seven days a week, from first to last light. She was six weeks from deployment and finally set to meet who she’d be paired with—most likely, they’d informed her, an operator from Intelligence Support Activity. One of the other pilot candidates had dropped out; she couldn’t hack it. The other was scary. Bigger, stronger, and tougher than Mary, she seemed the one that would ultimately qualify.

The mission was to infiltrate Iran with the ISA operator under a husband-and-wife cover, find a lost or maybe dead Iranian asset, and get out by foot, vehicle, or bird. She preferred the foot option, but, as ever, she wasn’t in charge. She was, in this assignment, a little better than chauffeur, most valuable as plausible spouse.