“Were I the president,” Ebbers said, “this would give me pause as to why the people currently holding the senior leadership positions at CIA in fact have these jobs. Frankly, gentlemen, this is an embarrassment.”

He leaned back from the report and took his time passing his eyes over each of them.

“We sitting on anything else, say, might help keep my ass out of the sling it’ll occupy beginning some thirteen minutes from now?”

Gates felt an ulcerous boil at the base of his gut. Even as the spymaster he’d become, Gates could not conceive of any strategy that could offer Ebbers salvation from appearing foolhardy, late, and ineffective in the upcoming meeting. And considering that shit, in the nation’s capital, flowed downhill with frictionless efficiency, the current circumstances meant to Gates that his job was pretty much shot to hell.

He could-and would, of course-take measures to shore things up. He would dig up and provide another white-hot chunk of intel he’d been sitting on and lay it out for Ebbers and the NSC somewhere out ahead of the curve instead of woefully behind. But even if Ebbers didn’t drop him like a sack of wet sand immediately following the pending NSC wrist-slap, Gates knew that any measures he took at this point would only amount to a four-corner stall. The fact was, unless he was prepared to bind and gag and leave Julie Laramie to rot in the corner of some overgrown park-which he’d given some thought to doing-Kircher would ultimately track the bitch down, the remainder of the truth would be exposed, and that would be all she wrote.

When neither Rosen nor Rader piped up with any helpful suggestions that might aid their boss, Gates performed a combination nod and shrug-meant to indicate he was being a man here, taking personal responsibility for Ebbers’s predicament.

“Sorry to say, Lou,” he said, “I think you’ve got just about all we know on this one.”

After a long while, Ebbers closed the file, rose, and left.

They sent a woman. That, she knew, was how they did it: match you up with your physical equal to avoid the intimidation factor, giving the impression you were being summoned for nothing more than a conversation.

Laramie had been through this before, at least a routine variation of it. Anyone working above the intern level in the Directorate of Intelligence was subjected to the “Scuds,” CIA’s routine psychological profile-refresher and lie detector exams. Laramie was long since in on the meaning behind the nickname: they hit you with annoying, hastily launched, generally ineffective missiles, hoping to put you on the defensive and force a mistake in case you might have something to hide. If you didn’t, the semiannual, four-hour sessions were a joke.

Since she’d endured her most recent bout with the Scuds only six weeks back, it was fairly evident to Laramie that the thirtysomething woman whose reflection appeared on a darkened portion of the monitor in her viewing cubicle had not come for another routine inquisition. The purpose of the visit was clear as day: they’d discovered her e-mails to Senator Kircher.

She wondered what it meant that they knew what she’d done. What they had in store for her. Then she wondered what they were doing with the intel they must have known she’d discovered-were they acting on it? Or just punishing her for leaking it? If history were any indication-

The woman asked Laramie to accompany her and led the way up the elevator to the fourth floor, home of the Internal Investigations Unit. The woman took her into an enclosed room equipped with a mirror, encouraged Laramie to take a seat in one of the room’s two chairs, and left, closing the door behind her and locking Laramie in.

Considering that Scud sessions typically began with a lie detector exam, that an investigative officer accompanied you through the entire process, and that the officer, until now, had never failed to offer up a cup of coffee to kick things off, it occurred to Laramie there was a pretty good chance she had one hell of a long day ahead of her.

Cooper found there wasn’t much in the Langley database on the topic of who controlled the real estate on the island called Mango Cay. Abandoning the ostensibly far-superior CIA search engine for plain old Google, he verified from the chair on his porch that real estate falling under the jurisdiction of Martinique could not be owned by foreigners, and, as in the British Virgins, a lease-hold system had been established to circumvent such revenue-killing nationalism. Property secured by foreign interests in both Martinique and the BVIs involved the transfer of what was usually a ninety-nine-year lease, ultimately rented from the federal government of France or the United Kingdom, respectively; it was the lease rights that were purchased or transferred by private property “owners” in the case of a local sale.

Cooper made some calls and ultimately found a clerk in the appropriate records hall in Martinique. The midday sun had begun to bear down on him, the old porch oriented poorly when it came to the blistering afternoon heat. Nonetheless, he managed to score from the clerk the reasonably uninteresting and possibly useless ownership history of Mango Cay. The current leaseholder was a Delaware corporation called Global Exports, whose signa-tory officer was somebody named Spencer H. Gibson. Global Exports had bought the Mango Cay lease just over ten years ago. The prior owner, according to the clerk, was a Liberian firm called Freedom Partners, LLC, which had controlled the land for nine years. Two individuals held it prior to that; Cooper jotted down the names as the clerk rattled them off. Before the clerk’s list of four ownership entities, the land had apparently been classified as uninhabited public property.

By the time he’d hung up on the clerk, Cooper had already clicked back into cyberspace and determined that no particular Agency record existed on anybody named Spencer H. Gibson. He was also unable to find any CIA-originated intelligence on either Global Exports or Freedom Partners, and the earlier owners, two American multimillionaires, were now deceased. Cooper dialed up the phone numbers the clerk had given for both Global Exports and Freedom Partners, reaching a disconnection notice for Global Exports and a loud, repeating bratt-bratt noise when he tried Freedom Partners. He tried the number a few more times and kept getting the same sound.

Annoyed and overheated, Cooper leaned his head back and fell asleep in the chair, the sun stinging hot on his face.

They kept her in the Scuds unit for thirty-eight hours. Sleep was not permitted and no food was provided. The throbbing headache that resulted from Laramie’s inability to quench her caffeine addiction would have made it impossible for her to sleep in any case, but with the added irritation of the headache, enduring the last hours of the interrogation nearly did her in. There were moments-for instance, the utterance of the thousandth repeat of the identical question, queried by the sixth interrogator of the session, with Laramie strapped into the lie detector seat, EKG stickers adorning breasts, belly, hips, wrists-when Laramie was forced to dig her fingernails into the skin of her palm, even to bite a bleeding incision into her tongue, in order to keep from leaping from the chair and bashing the interrogator’s brains in.

Ironically, it was the interrogation simulation they’d given her at The Farm that gave her the chops to survive the thirty-eight hours intact. One of the first lessons they’d conveyed to the fresh batch of recruits back then had been simple enough to remember now: never go belly-up. No matter what they had on you, never admit that you did anything wrong, who you worked for, or whatever it was they were trying to get out of you-or so went the lesson. The principle was intended for use in the unlikely event a DI analyst subjected to torture in a Syrian prison just happened to possess the secrets underpinning America’s national security, but it proved particularly useful as a guide on what to admit, and what to deny, as the Agency’s own investigators sought to pry various confessions from her on the topic of her supposedly treasonous activities.