Rafe drove up the hill toward the massive white columns of the Palais des Nations, where the League of Nations had cratered and the United Nations now did God knows what. He turned left at the forty-foot sculpture of a chair with one of its legs blown off, a symbolic protest against land mines. Next to the crippled chair, women in white head scarves had erected signs protesting a genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka, a situation about which Rafe knew nothing. He turned left again at the International Tennis Club and headed up a drive to the first barrier, where a Swiss policeman approached and demanded, obligingly in English, “ID.” Rafe reached into an inside jacket pocket and pulled out a laminated card and showed it. The policeman waved him on to the next barrier, where private guards allowed him to pass the concrete bollards. And then, after US Marines had one more look at his credential, Rafe was inside a wide seven-story building festooned with solar panels—the Permanent Mission of the United States of America to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.

In the lobby he passed by the photos of the four ambassadors in residence (one to the United Nations-Geneva, three to other international organizations) and stowed his phone in a locker. The ambassadors’ offices were upstairs, but Rafe took an elevator down. He exited to a concrete corridor that led to a steel door. He looked into the retinal scanner and waited for a green light. Then he pushed the door open and he walked through it and the door closed.

There were five people in the SCIF (pronounced “skiff,” which made him think of the small boat he had gotten seasick in when his grandfather thought he should learn how to fish). It was a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, constructed in accordance with Intelligence Community Directive 705—walls, floor, and ceiling made of eight-inch concrete with five-eighths-inch steel reinforcing rods spaced every six inches, horizontally and vertically, and soundproofed to Sound Transmission Class 50, so that “very loud sounds within the SCIF, such as loud singing, brass music, or a radio at full volume, can be heard with the human ear faintly or not at all outside of the SCIF.”

There were no brass bands in the room, though Rafe thought that might have made for a nice change. There were five individuals, all SCI cleared: Rafe, his colleague Frank, the local FBI legat who hoped this wouldn’t take long because he wanted to drive over to France and play nine holes before the sun went down, the Diplomatic Security RSO who wanted to know everything about everything all the time, and Helen Sykes, the CIA chief of station, who was fifty years old and the toughest guy in the room. There were bottles of water on the conference table.

After cursory nods and greetings, it was Rafe’s show. He had visual aids, because everyone liked visual aids.