Gordon, claiming his intimacy with Adam, leaned in to the contact sheet. They back-and-forthed a few comments Vera couldn’t hear. Bray seemed amused by one of the photographs. Adam’s one smile was tight. After a while, it got plain Adam was unwilling to adopt Bray’s air of cheerio disdain. Bray lounged back, doubly bored, now by Adam’s probity.

Tabitha, at the door again, said, “Don is stuck in traffic coming from the Pentagon. Terribly sorry. At least another ten minutes.” The rookie Pentagon reporter looked aggrieved. Don Grady encroaching at the Pentagon might always be happening, but it usually went unannounced.

“We’ll start, then,” Adam said. He pulled his lower lip upward. Could he be trying to look like an eagle?

“Remind me,” said the Metro editor, slumped on the windowsill. “Who is it that says this Wizards fan is some kind of a spook?”

“Let’s not. Let’s have some … I don’t want that kind of discussion just yet,” Adam said sternly. It seemed as if the diction, not the question, offended him, but Vera couldn’t be sure. From the desire of being loved, deliver me.

“I am having a great deal of trouble following, but maybe it’s just me,” said the zaftig, whose name was Constance. She spoke out of her nose, scanning and reading. “Oh yes. That’s right. Never mind.”

From the desire of being extolled.

Harriet, the seasoned Pentagon reporter, cleared her throat. She took a sip of coffee. “How much of the report did you get?” she asked Vera without malice. Vera liked her calm face.

She could feel Stanley draw himself into an invisible snit on the side table. He’d wanted Vera to be vague about this, and here, best reporter in the Room had of course asked the question, clearly and affably. “She has all the pages relevant to Potomac Pilot,” Stanley told Harriet hurriedly. She looked at him as if he were a spaniel. “Potomac Pilot?” she followed up.

“We need Don. You see, this is why Don should be here.” Adam glared, putting down the glass piece on his desk.

“Vera,” Harriet tried again.

“I have the report,” Vera said. She wouldn’t lie. She’d made that promise to herself. She was sticking. From the desire of being honored, deliver me.

“Vera and I,” began the National projects editor, wanting to mark out his territory, which was Vera, in all her iffy new importance. Stanley had been consigned to nosebleed seats weeks ago. Vera’s reporting and writing were now under the hot-ticket supervision of this man, who’d spent the last many weeks apologizing for not talking to her. “Vera and I had to make a decision early on, which we did, and that was that we would be creating more problems than we could solve if we tried to fully parse the report.”

“I’d like to see it,” Harriet said. Vera knew that would happen. How Stanley had imagined it would not, she failed to see. From the desire of being praised.