For Helen Sykes, the situation in Geneva was made worse by the fact that the mission there housed not one but four ambassadors. There was the ambassador to the United Nations-Geneva, the ambassador to the World Trade Organization, the ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, and the ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council. This multitude of ambassadors meant annual disputes over whom should be listed first on invitations to the mission’s Fourth of July reception, and, for Sykes, three or four times as much time and effort wasted in useless interactions.

She was having more interactions with them lately than she was with her husband, another CIA veteran currently working in Peru. She sometimes wondered if, when they retired, they would even recognize each other. On the bright side, their daughter was doing great as a computer science major at Howard. (Until she was fourteen, she’d thought both her parents worked for a farm equipment manufacturer with a lot of foreign clients.)

In any case, Sykes had been in no great mood for additional non-CIA people in her life when Rafael Sassaman arrived from Washington, fresh off his recruitment and minimal training as an officer (undercover, no less!) of the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. He was presentable in a preppy-meets-Wall Street kind of way and was apparently intelligent. His only flaw was that he didn’t know anything. About intelligence, anyway. So Langley had told her to liaise with him, and by “liaise” they meant “make sure he doesn’t do anything so stupid that it blows back on us.” She had passed the assignment on to Frank Lopez, who had gone from St. Louis to the US Army and then the CIA, where he was now a case officer. He had protested that he had better things to do than babysit some rich kid playing spy. “So do I,” said Sykes, and she made it an order.

When the Homeboy situation arose, it did seem reasonable (barely) to put part of it in the hands of Rafael (“call me Rafe”) Sassaman because of the possible connection to financial machinations, a field in which he was experienced and which had made him prosperous enough to retire from Wall Street and dabble, an altruistic hobbyist, in government work at a GS-15 pay grade. Also in his favor: he had no doubt pulled off many machinations of his own during his career in finance, some of them at least semi-criminal, making him the proverbial one it takes to know one.