A TWO-MAN BAND—PIANIST AND VIOLINIST—PLAYED IN THE CORNER of the bar. After they ordered drinks Avery headed over to put in a request. Walt sat alone at the bar sipping a Worthy Park single estate reserve and contemplating the predicament he’d found himself in. It felt like weeks, not days, since he’d sat in this tavern and met Avery Mason for the first time. Back then he was anxious to get back in the saddle of an operation, get his mind off the wallowing thoughts of Meghan Cobb’s betrayal, and work his way out of the funk of self-pity and anger he was in. When he sat in this bar on Tuesday night, Walt was excited to have been tapped by the Bureau to play such an important role in a case that had stumped them. That Jim Oliver had gone to such lengths to find and recruit him had given Walt a sense of purpose. A sense of being needed. It was a feeling that had been absent from the past three years of his life. Now, he couldn’t help but make the comparison to when he was a twenty-eight-year-old kid tapped to run a high-profile homicide investigation. The thought crossed his mind that he was being manipulated today in much the same way he had been twenty years earlier. He’d fallen for the romanticism of it all—a delicate case, a top target, and the glory that would come from a successful operation. That he’d have to put his ethics aside and quell any moral objections that arose was simply part of the job, Jim Oliver had convinced him. And now Walt had gone and made a goddamn mess of things. He was sleeping with the woman who was under his surveillance. Worse than that, he was feeling something for her.

The crushing burden of guilt had sat heavy on his shoulders on the walk over from Avery’s hotel. Walt worked hard to convince himself that he had not slept with Avery out of any hell-bent effort to obtain information from her. It was spontaneous and unplanned. It had happened in the heat of the moment. But that was then and this is now, he thought. The way the rest of tonight had to play out put him in knots. He’d left the listening devices on the coffee table in her hotel room, and had no choice but to return there to retrieve them. Once there, the inevitable would likely follow. It would be then that Walt Jenkins, in his own mind, would have crossed the line.