Three hours after leaving McGlade, Ben and Paula were on a flight to Costa Rica. Hort had arranged for a small jet to take them from Orlando International. Ben didn’t ask and Hort wouldn’t have told him, but Ben suspected the jet was part of the Jeppesen/Boeing-supported civilian fleet used to render and transport war-on-terror detainees through a series of black site prisons.

Ben had never been to Costa Rica and hated the idea of a hot landing in a place he didn’t know and didn’t have time to reconnoiter. Ordinarily, he would arrive in a place several weeks before the actual action to thoroughly familiarize himself with the terrain. No chance for that this time around, but he’d bought a guidebook in Orlando and was perusing it on the plane. Far from ideal, but it was a start. And he’d picked up some sneakers and a Tommy Bahama short-sleeved button-down shirt and cargo shorts that he figured would blend better than the faux-FBI outfit he’d worn to visit Marcy Wheeler. Paula was still in her navy pantsuit, and he figured she was most comfortable looking professional and governmental. Fine for her, but he generally liked to look like whatever would be least noticed in the environment at hand.

He’d called Hort after leaving McGlade’s office. Lanier’s credentials checked out: FBI special agent, joined the Bureau out of SMU right after 9/11, currently working out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. -same as one Dan Froomkin. Known for being a maverick and a pain in the ass, but also for getting results. Hort agreed with Ben’s assessment that her threat to kick up a public fuss about Ben’s visit to Larison’s wife wasn’t a bluff. Meaning for the time being, it was best to keep her close.

“Now, listen,” Hort had told him. “Maybe Costa Rica will turn out to be a dead end. But if it’s something, if Larison has someone he cares about there, if part of his plan is to disappear with her afterward to a private island or who knows what, and he figures out you’re keying on that someone, he’ll feel cornered. You’d be threatening his op, his girlfriend, everything. This is personal to him. So you watch yourself, son. I told you, you’re good, but you’re not in his league. Not yet.”

The “not yet” removed the sting. “I’ll be careful.”

“Good. And hang on for a minute… okay, while we’ve been talking, I got a printout of Larison’s travel records from the ICE database. Looks like he did travel to Costa Rica, spring of 2005. Flight from Tegucigalpa, where he was TDY at the time. But nothing in April 2007.”

“He traveled that first time under his own name?”

“Yes, and it fits. Say something happened while he was there that first time, he met someone. After that, he wouldn’t want to keep going back under his own name. With one data point, there’s no pattern, nothing for anyone to look for. He had no way of knowing he’d get placed in Costa Rica through something else. Now, you say this McGlade claims Larison killed someone on one of these trips?”

“That’s what he told us, yeah. The one where Larison traveled from Miami on April 17.”

“Okay, that would be an Airbus A320, hundred and fifty seats. Figure two-thirds full, half the passengers women… my guess is, we’ll have to sift through something like forty or fifty names before we spot the one that isn’t like the others. Once we know what legend he was traveling under that day, we can cross-reference, see if he’s been using it for something else. This is promising. Good work, son.”

Ben was annoyed at himself for needing the man’s approval. He wondered if Larison had been this way, or if that was something an operator grew out of. Maybe that’s what Hort meant about him becoming like Larison, if he kept developing this way. He wondered.

Hort had also checked up on Taibbi. Vietnam combat veteran, three tours with the 82nd Airborne, and an LRRP-long-range reconnaissance patrol. Meaning he was self-reliant, understood stealth, and would be handy with a variety of close-range weapons. A conviction in 1982 on arms-trafficking charges. Pleaded guilty, served three years, moved to Costa Rica in 1987, and hadn’t had a problem with the law since then. According to his current passport and cellphone records, he was presently in Jacó, and Ben could reasonably expect to find him at his bar.

He looked at Paula. She was asleep in the seat facing his, her head dipped forward. The cabin was aglow with the sun setting ahead of them and her face was obscured by shadow.

He watched her, enjoying the opportunity to do so unobserved. He liked her hair, liked that she kept it short and natural. Though with her face, he supposed she could do pretty much anything she wanted with her hair and things would be just fine.

He wondered what it must be like for her at the Bureau, a black woman, clearly smarter and more capable than most of the people she had to answer to. Did she have to work twice as hard as her peers? Did she use her sex appeal, or did she try to suppress it? She didn’t wear a ring. Was she single? Did she date? Were guys intimidated about going out with a government agent? Did she ever have a thing for someone at work, and have to fight to try to hide it?

He rotated his neck, cracking the joints, still watching her. What would she be like in bed? Would the professional façade be so important she couldn’t ever let it go? Or could she allow someone to see her naked, not just literally, but figuratively, too?

She said no one ever saw her coming. If it was true, he decided, it was also a shame. He decided Paula coming would be a very fine thing to see.

And then he thought of Sarah and was immediately ashamed of himself. But what could he really share with her? He never felt so alive as he did when he was hunting. Not a politically correct thing to admit, probably, and Sarah would have found it repellant, but wasn’t it true for everyone? That everyone loved to do the things they were good at? Yeah, he wasn’t the smoothest guy in the world, and sure, he had some development ahead of him, but Hort was right, there was nothing he was suited for like ops. He’d survived shit that would have killed most men, most good men, even, and he’d survived it because he was better. How could he not enjoy-how could he not exult in-what he did, what he was? And who was Sarah, or anyone else, to judge him for that?

What was that saying? People sleep soundly in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm them. Something like that, anyway.

Well, he was one of those rough men. And he wasn’t going to change that, not for Sarah, not for anyone. And fuck anyone who had a problem with it.

Ulrich could no longer see the K Street traffic below him. It was dark outside, and his windows were now effectively mirrors. It was too late to make any more phone calls, and he was too agitated to get any work done anyway, but still he lingered. His two sons were in college and his home life had long since settled into a sexless kiss hello, followed by a perfunctory recitation of the minutiae of the day, followed by the sounds of the television in the next room, followed by sleep. He and his wife had become strangers, bound mostly by past and progeny, acquaintances who continued to share the same space merely out of habit, the result of some long-ago momentum that itself was slowly dying, as, he supposed, were they.

Not that it had been so terribly different even before the boys had left for school. He was the vice president’s special assistant back when the vice president had been the secretary of defense, and after that he’d served as the Defense Department’s general counsel. Cynthia had put her foot down about the hours after Timmy, their second, had been born, and Ulrich had joined a law firm to placate her. The money was better but the work was boring, and he’d missed being on the inside. So returning as the new vice president’s chief of staff when his old boss was tapped as the president’s understudy was impossible to resist. Cynthia had put up a few pro forma arguments, but she knew not to fight the battle she couldn’t win.