Where a moment earlier she had been all fire, she turned cold. “I could have gone to jail for the rest of my life if I’d told you.”

“I know. I don’t want this to come across as blame. But I wish I had known. When we were prepping, when we were doing the murderboard . . . it would have been helpful. We could have prepared.”

“What did you expect me to do? That information was beyond top secret; it wasn’t even disclosed to most of the CIA! The president didn’t even know. Did you really expect me to volunteer that to you?”

“I don’t know.”

She stared at him, her jaw tightening, but he could see that she was too tired, too distracted to find the energy to be mad at him, too. “Vincent’s death was supposed to remain unidentified. He was going to be one of those unknown stars on the CIA memorial wall, same as the other three who died. I didn’t even know their names.”

Well, now you do, he thought, then a chill ran through him as he made a connection—four CIA agents dead in an event no one was supposed to know about. “Where did they die?”

“It was somewhere in Virginia. Southwestern Virginia.”

“Bedford, Virginia?”

“I don’t know. I think so. Why?”

The words he had sent Nils came back to him, clear as if he were reading them from a textbook: I overheard Kaplan talking about losing agents in Bedford, VA the day after NORAD. Two vehicles were recovered. That’s all I know.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I . . .” He swallowed the bile forming his throat. “I heard something about an incident in Bedford. But I didn’t realize—”

Had Nils been Julian’s whistleblower? There could have been any number of ways Julian got ahold of that information. It didn’t necessarily come through the Nils pipeline.

If Nils had found something, he wouldn’t forward it to Julian, he told himself. He would leak it. What benefit would it possibly confer to him to give it to Julian instead of leaking it? No, it couldn’t have been Nils. Julian had to have found out about this some other way.

Unless Nils wanted something from Julian, and Julian offered to give it to him.

“How many people has Obelus killed?” asked Kaveh. “Four?”

“At least.”

Julian is probably going to win the presidency. Nils knows this. There is a lot Julian could offer Nils.

“And NORAD?”

“I know people died there. I don’t know how many.”

The overlap of their rhetoric, how it had dovetailed in recent weeks, seemed so clear to him all of a sudden. The way they used almost the same wording, “debride the rot,” “cut the corruption.” The same lines. The same rhetoric.

Oh, God. Did I do this?