“I agree.” Pritchart pushed back in her own chair and pinched the bridge of her nose wearily. “The problem is, Tom, that he’s got us between a rock and a hard place on the information side. The same logic that puts too high a political price on firing him holds just as true for what you’re suggesting, and you know it. If we have him indicted and tried, then the very information we’re trying to keep secret will come out in open court. Unless you’re prepared to suggest holding a secret trial of a cabinet-level minister of the government whose legitimacy we’re still trying to sell to its own legislators?”

“I—” Theisman started to reply angrily, then stopped and drew a very deep breath. He sat completely still for several heartbeats, then shook himself.

“You’re right.” He shook his head. “And the worst of it is that I don’t doubt for a moment that he planned it that way from the beginning to protect himself if we found out what he was up to.”

“That’s just the problem, Tom. We still don’t know what he’s up to. The information he’s sharing with his political allies is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Oh, I’ve got some pretty firm suspicions of what his ultimate goals are in a general sense, but right this minute, we don’t know exactly what immediate goal he’s headed for.”

“Kevin doesn’t have any idea at all?” Theisman sounded the next best thing to incredulous, and Pritchart’s lips quirked in a wry smile.

“Kevin Usher has the instincts of a paranoid cat and the heart of a lion. He also has an incredibly soft and gooey center, which he takes great pains to hide. But one thing he doesn’t have is telepathy or clairvoyance. We’re lucky he’s picked up this much. And,” she admitted, “we’re also lucky that he decided to report it directly to me.”

“And who else should he have reported it to?”

“The point,” Pritchart explained patiently, “is that we chose Kevin for the FIA specifically because he’s seen entirely too much of the downside of using domestic security information for political advantage. Arguably, anything Arnold’s done so far could be put down to a case of bad judgment and loose lips. Even though what he’s done is illegal, it could be nothing more than inadvertent garrulousness on his part, and Kevin is probably better aware than anyone else in this city of just how much tension there is between Arnold and me. So I will guarantee you that he thought twice, or even three times, before he handed me information I could use to hammer Arnold if that was what I decided to do with it. The fact that he knows me as well as he does is probably the only reason he passed his findings along to me.”

“Are you saying that with another president he might have suppressed the information?” Theisman frowned. “Somehow, that doesn’t jibe with my impression of him. Or, I guess what I mean is that if it had ever occurred to me that he might do something like that, I’d’ve been very, very unhappy when you chose him for his job.”