In a conversation with Frank and Helen Sykes, it was considered whether Rafe might simply ask his friend Majid if he had a client named Stavro, but, if he did, and Majid passed the query on, Stavro might disappear. If Stavro was Homeboy, they wanted to observe him, track him, get to know his friends and connections, perhaps blackmail or threaten and turn him, not drive him away.

Rafe thought every day about quitting. And wondering at the end of every day why he had not. His colleagues were ruthless, monomaniacal about their mission. They had killed, and they had shrugged off the killing. They were not . . . nice.

Not nice? What had Mao said? A revolution is not a dinner party. And neither, of course, is combating terrorist fanatics who think nothing of blowing up teenage concertgoers or French cartoonists and who enslave and rape women who practice the wrong kind of Islam and behead people for listening to Beethoven or not growing beards. If Ron Mayfield had been killed by accident (and surely no one on Rafe’s “side” had broken into that office intending to kill him), that was one death against thousands, against tens of thousands, in a worldwide battle. And it was a battle. And Rafe, unlike his brother, had never been in a battle (except with a few birds in Texas). And maybe he liked the idea that he, a former overpaid Wall Street drone, was now a combatant in the battle of the century. If he was fighting that battle at cocktail receptions in Geneva, not mountain ranges in Afghanistan, if he risked nothing except feeling bad about an accidental casualty (collateral damage!), well, he was too old to join the Marines and he was not going to charter a jet and parachute solo into the Hindu Kush. And, anyway, Helen Sykes was right. There was here now. There was everywhere. He had a friend whose grandfather had joined the Navy in World War II, when everybody served. The man owned a women’s clothing store in Detroit. The Navy trained him—to be a dentist—and he spent the entire war at the Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago fixing the appalling teeth of draftees from Appalachia. When the war ended, he went back to selling ladies’ dresses in Detroit. One served where one could. And Rafe was doing more than that. Wasn’t he?