“That’s why we’re going there,” Mabel explained. “No one we know would go there.”

“I could be there in twenty minutes.”

“How long is this thing?”

“The executive summary is several hundred pages. The whole thing, we’re talking about boxes. But I have it on DVDs.”

“They probably didn’t even read it—at the other paper. When did you give it to them?”

“Yesterday.”

“My husband’s had it all summer.”

“I know that!”

“He doesn’t put these things in the paper. You must know that. It’s for his book,” Mabel said.

“He must have read it.”

“He has a lot of assistants.”

“He wouldn’t fob this off on one of them.”

“He would have had to—anything that long. People give him records, documents, downloads all the time. It’s not humanly possible to read it all.”

“But I told him what was important. He didn’t have to read the whole thing.”

“For whatever reason, my husband thought your take on the important parts was off-base. And, from a news standpoint, he could be right. So could the other paper. What looks like news to you, inside, isn’t always news to newspapers. You know that. Come on.”

“We’ll see if you think that after you read it.”

•  •  •

He couldn’t explain anything to her anymore. His mother was a liberal, although Will saw her trying to hide it. Sometimes negative things would come out, and she would have liked to ask about them. His father must have stopped her. Or something inside her did, something in her that appreciated the trip to Paris he’d given her, a week of glum for him. Did she see that? It was hard to know what got grasped, even between two people who should have known each other better than anyone.

Used to be, she’d cut out the newspaper stories that ran anything about intelligence. Soon enough, she had so many, and there was so much of it unread, she couldn’t make sense of what he’d try to remind her was his part. Electronics, any story about electronics—that was about all she could say she retained.

He realized in this new time that if Sissy got updates on everything that was sensitive and compartmented, they’d read through next to none of it. Staffers in the past would be up all night with reports like that, but he’d noticed since 9/11 that more and more didn’t stay up to speed. He could mention something in one of the Sissy updates, and he could tell they were pretending to have read about it.