She forced herself to sit up. “Dick Cheney.”

He lowered himself to his knees and whispered, “Are you being held prisoner?”

Her breath was still shallow, and she was having a hard time concentrating on him at all. She leaned against the back of the cave, trying to shake it off, but her skull throbbed painfully. “No.”

He nodded like a hostage negotiator on a particularly difficult assignment. “I know this might be out of your control,” he said in a gentle voice, “but please don’t kill me.”

“Huh?” Then she remembered what he had overheard. “Oh.”

“Whatever is going on, I might be able to help you. I think I’m probably already on your side.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry about it?” He sounded offended.

“I mean, it was a conditional threat— if he’s not around to protect me, he’d have to take extreme measures if you were to try to harm me. So . . . don’t do that, and you’ll be fine.”

“He?” The man assessed her piteously as if he were talking to someone who spoke in tongues. “Are you . . . okay?”

She looked at him incredulously. Do I look okay? she thought. Then she remembered what had happened earlier in the day yesterday. What Kaplan had said about him being dangerous, why she had run from him in the first place.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He sat all the way down on the smooth floor with her. “My name’s Kaveh.”

Kaveh, she thought. Kaveh of the long Indian-sounding name, who works for The New Yorker.

Then it clicked where she’d heard his name before.

A journalist at The New Yorker had obtained documents detailing the detainment of her mother and siblings last year, a guy who’d sent said documents to Nils the second he’d gotten them. A journalist Sol had described as an unscrupulous “shitbag burnout.” Sol had wondered why this guy had sent those documents to Nils instead of publishing them himself.

“You,” she whispered. “You work with Nils.”

His expression, which had briefly been one of professional courtesy, morphed back into fear. Guilty, that expression read. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

“Oh, God, you’re going to go to Nils with this.”

“No,” he said, realizing his affiliation with Nils could be his death sentence. “I won’t, I swear. I don’t have any formal affiliation with him. I barely talk to him.”

“Then why did you pass the documents about my family’s detainment to him? Why didn’t you publish them yourself?”

His mouth hung open, as though he was weighing the wisdom of a lie or a half truth. “I thought it would be the right thing to do. It was his family, not mine. And he was such a lightning rod, all eyes were on him. I thought he would get much more immediate results than I would have.”