So now an appeal to sentiment. A two-pronged approach: logic, to the effect that the situation had changed and I could no longer accomplish my mission; emotion, to the effect that, if I continued to try, she would pay the price.

“I understand what you’re saying,” I told her. “But I also understand where you’re coming from. The second is what gives me pause about the first.”

It made me feel a little sad to say it. Things had been so relaxed for a while. Christ, the whiskey was getting to me. I’m not usually sentimental.

“That’s fair,” she said, nodding. “Nonetheless, what I’ve told you is accurate. Do a little digging-leaving me out of it, if you can, please-and you’ll see.”

I nodded. “The digging is already happening. Discreetly, you’re not part of it.” Not entirely true, but how my inquiry to Kanezaki might affect her was something I would think about later.

I took a sip of the Laphroaig. “Anyway, I need to figure out where this leak is coming from, so I can close it.”

“You think the problem is on your side?”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time. I learned a long time ago that democracies are dangerous to work with. They’re hindered by all those annoying checks and balances, all that meddlesome public opinion, so they have built-in incentives to find ways of doing things off the books. Sometimes it gets a little hard to follow who you’re dealing with.”

She smiled. “Want Castro whacked? Hire the Mafia.”

I smiled back. “Sure. Or, if Congress won’t cough up the appropriations, fund the Contras through the Sultan of Brunei.”

“Or bankroll almost anything by getting the Saudis to pay for it.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I see your point.”

She moved her hands up and down like a pedestrian trying to slow down an oncoming car, the gesture both impatient and suppliant. “Sorry to belabor it. But you have to understand, Nine-Eleven put America into a bad state of schizophrenia. The country committed itself to a ‘war on terrorism,’ but still pays billions of oil dollars to the Saudis, knowing that those dollars fund all the groups with whom America purports to be at war. Fifteen of the nineteen Nine-Eleven hijackers were Saudi, but no one wants to talk about that. Can you imagine the reaction if the hijackers had been Iranian, or North Korean? I think if America were a person, a psychiatrist would classify her as being in profound psychological denial. I don’t know how you can trust an employer like that.”

“Do you trust yours?” I asked.

She looked down. Her hands descended gently to her lap. After a moment, she said, “It’s complicated.”

“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.”

She sighed. “I trust their intentions. Some of the… the policies are stupid and outmoded. But I don’t have to agree with every decision to know I’m doing the right thing.”

From her body language and her voice, I knew that my question had troubled her. But not for the reasons she had just articulated. There was something else.

“Do they trust you?” I asked.

She smiled and started to say something, then stopped. She looked down again. “That’s also… complicated,” she said.

“How?”

She looked left and right, as though searching for an answer. “They trained me and vetted me,” she said after a moment. “And I’m good at what I do. I’m resourceful and I have a track record to go on.”

She took a sip of the Laphroaig and I waited for her to go on.

“But, let’s face it, what I do, I sleep with the enemy. Literally. It’s hard for people to get past that. They wonder what it makes me feel, whether it might… infect me, or something.”

“How does it make you feel?” I asked, unable not to.

She looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I nodded and we were silent for a moment. Then I said, “You’re taking a lot of risks with this operation. Maybe more even than usual. Some people might argue that, with me in the picture, with the guy at the hotel, things have gotten unacceptably hot for you, that you should get out. But you haven’t.”

She smiled, but the smile didn’t take.

“Are you trying to prove something?” I asked. “Trying to earn someone’s respect by putting your life on the line here?”

“What would you know about that?” she asked. Her tone was a little sharp, and I suspected I was on to something.

I smiled gently. “I fought with the U.S. in Vietnam. Against ‘gooks’ and ‘zipperheads’ and ‘slopes.’ Look at my face, Delilah.”

She did.

“You see my point?” I said. “It took me years to realize why I was willing to do some of the things I did there.”

She nodded, then drained what was left in her glass. “I see. Yes, you would understand, then.”

“Are they worth it, though? They send you out on these missions, at huge risk to you, you bring back the goods, and still they don’t trust you. Why bother?”

“Why bother?” she asked, tilting her head to the side as though trying to see something she had missed in me before. “Have you ever seen an infant with its legs torn off by a bomb? Seen its mother holding it, insane with grief and horror?”

A rhetorical question, for most people. Not for me.

“Yes,” I said, my voice quiet. “I have.”

She paused, looking at me, then said, “Well, the work I do prevents some of these nightmares. When I do my job well, when we disrupt the flow of funds and matériel to the monsters who strap on vests filled with explosives and rat poison and nails, a baby that would have died lives, or a family that would have grieved forever doesn’t have to, or minds that would have been destroyed by trauma remain intact.”

She paused again, then added, “I should quit? Because my superiors who ought to know better don’t trust me? Yes, then I can explain to the bereft and the amputees and the permanently traumatized that I could have done something to save them, but didn’t, because I wasn’t treated sufficiently respectfully at the office.”

She looked at me, her cheeks flushed, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing.

I looked back, feeling an odd combination of admiration, attraction, and shame. I took a big swallow of the Laphroaig, finishing it. I refreshed her glass, then mine.

“You’re lucky,” I said, after a moment.

She blinked. “What?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples for a moment. “To believe in something the way you do…” I opened my eyes. “Christ, I can’t imagine it.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “It doesn’t feel lucky.”

“No, I’m sure it doesn’t. I used the wrong word. I should have said ‘fortunate.’ It’s not the same thing.”

I rubbed my temples again. “I’m sorry I said what I said. That you shouldn’t bother. Over the years, I’ve developed the habit of… preempting betrayal. Of thinking that the possibility of betrayal, and defending against it, is paramount. And maybe that’s true for me. But it shouldn’t be true for everyone. It shouldn’t be true for someone like you.”

For a few moments, neither of us spoke. Then she asked, “What are you thinking?”

I waited a second, then said, “That I like the way you use your hands when you talk.” Telling her part of it.

She glanced down at her hands for a second, as though checking to see whether they were doing something right then, and laughed quietly. “I don’t usually do that. You pissed me off.”

“You weren’t only doing it when you were pissed.”

“Oh. Well, I do it when I forget myself.”

“When does that happen?”

“Rarely.”

“You should do it more often.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Why?”

“You know why. You have to protect yourself.”

Her expression was so neutral that I knew she had to be consciously controlling it. She took a sip of the Laphroaig and asked, “And you? What do you do?”

“I don’t get close.”

“I told you, I don’t have that luxury.”

I looked at her and said, “I’ve never thought of it as a luxury.”