Martina hoped she had Adam’s attention, but with Adam you often couldn’t tell—was that the basis for her longing? Her therapist believed this. Martina resisted that interpretation. Martina did, however, practice some of the techniques they’d talked about for getting past obsessive attachment when important work on the job was at hand. She thought of Adam’s wife, Joan, most particularly of a kind of angelic connotation around her eyes; then considered Adam’s discolored teeth, and in particular the left canine, which was practically sepia. She completed the cognitive refocusing by dwelling on his rocky mannerisms. Her feelings cratered just enough so she could say without emotion, “We have a problem.”

Adam sensed it. The other paper had broken a story his paper should have.

“The report. They have a story on it,” Martina said. “Story’s on their site; the wire already has a story; CNN just cut away from regular programming to tease it. They’re saying DOD, some military-intelligence component, has had the White House under surveillance.”

“The report?”

“IC updates to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

Adam stared into the near distance with determination. Martina waited for him to remember.

“Family Jewels II,” she said. They had been discussing it in a few meetings. Still she waited.

Don. It was always about Don. Family Jewels was his triumph. But what was Jewels II?

“Did you say someone is spying on the White House?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “The wire is hedging. There may be legal precedent for it.”

“Have you talked to Kim?” Kim was the longtime Justice Department reporter.

“Well, she thinks it would be the general counsel at the CIA we need to get with—but I was hoping we’d have someone on the Hill who had somebody on Sissy they could—”

“Sissy? The Sissy report?” Adam didn’t let his voice rise.

Martina thought her therapist would have something to say about this slowness in Adam, would compare it to her father, would—but wait, she—

Adam looked away from Martina. He found himself looking at the flowers on her desk.

“Yes,” she said, noticing him on the flowers.

“Where’s Mitch?”

“Mitch? I think the question is, where’s Tom.” Martina spoke of the man who covered the Senate, where the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could be found and from which the report—Martina believed, her deputy asserted, and, unbeknown to Martina, Mabel Cannon at her dinner party had assumed—originated.

“Tom?” Adam searched around for that name in his head. In a seesaw of almost commensurate justice, Adam’s reporters did not read the paper, and he did not know those who wrote it.

“Tom Romero. We just hired him from Metro to cover the Senate,” Martina said, happy that Adam had displayed one of his least appealing traits—acting like a rhinoceros.

“What’s Mitch working on?” Adam said.