So for eight years he’d arrived at his sons’ basketball games only in the last quarter, if at all, and the family had maintained the fiction that dad was mostly home for dinner by moving the meal hour to eight, then to nine… and even then, more often than not, he’d had to call with an apology and another useless promise that everyone knew he’d break next time, too. Mostly by the time he’d get home in the evening the boys had been asleep, and often he was gone again the next morning by the time they woke. Weekends he tried to be around. But with two active war theaters and so many initiatives to keep the country safe… it was just all-consuming. How would he have explained it to his family if there had been another attack on his watch? They told him they understood and he hoped it was true. And Cynthia, whatever resentments she might once have harbored over his absences, seemed to have long since let them go. He was grateful to her for that. But none of it changed the fact that his children had grown up and left the house, and he’d barely been around to see any of it. And nothing would ever bring that time back for him, or give him a chance to relive what he’d missed. Nothing.

He tried to let it go. Ruminating about the past, happily or otherwise, wasn’t a luxury he could afford just now. It was the future he needed to worry about. He tried running worst-case scenarios in his mind. Ordinarily, this kind of exercise would calm him. This time, though, the scenarios were exceptionally horrific. If Clements screwed the pooch on the tapes, and if Ulrich’s backup failed, too, he was going to be left with not much more than the gobbledygook Condi Rice had been caught stammering in response to those little Stanford shits. What was it again? The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture… and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency. That they had policy authorization subject to the Justice Department’s clearance… so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. People laughed at her at the time. But what else could she say? She had to say something.

Yeah, it was feeble enough when Rice said it. In Ulrich’s case, it wouldn’t work at all. Because his name-his signature, for God’s sake-was all over the authorizations.

He heard the chime of incoming email and checked the message. Damn, this was good. Daniel Larison, former JSOC operator. The name sounded familiar… one of the people they’d suspected when the tapes first went missing? But hadn’t that guy been dead? He’d look into it, figure out the discrepancy. He tried not to hope, but maybe, just maybe they actually had a shot at getting this genie back in the bottle.

At the bottom of the message, he noticed an attachment. It was a photo of a blond guy, mid- or early thirties. The guy’s eyes were closed, but even so, somehow there was a hard look about him. Ulrich thought for a moment, then moved the photo into a new email-Who is this? One of yours?-and forwarded it to Clements. He’d send the rest of the information after he heard back. These days he trusted the CIA less than ever.

He blew out a long breath. It was going to be a long five days. Well, with a little luck, or a lot of luck, more likely, maybe this could be resolved more quickly.

He opened his office safe, removed an encrypted thumb drive, and popped it into his computer. He was like a home owner with a raging fire bearing down on his house. It made sense to take a fresh look at his insurance policy.

On the thumb drive were unredacted copies of the Office of Legal Counsel memos, the secret opinions the administration had made the Justice Department draw up to legalize enhanced interrogation techniques. Everyone involved understood that worst case, no matter what else happened, the memos would give them legal cover: Senator, we were just doing what the Justice Department told us was legal. The CIA certainly understood the game. They’d had it played on them not long before: Senator, we were just following the CIA’s intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hell, if you were in Washington and didn’t know this was the way the game was played, it meant it was being played on you.

But Ulrich understood the memos would serve an additional purpose, one most people didn’t recognize. Ulrich was familiar with the concept of “force drift,” which was basically the notion that when you set a fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, you did so knowing that in fact people would drive at seventy, instead. So when he had instructed the Justice Department to create the memos, he knew two things. First, that no matter what the memos authorized, looked at properly, the authorizations could be construed as limitations. Second, that no matter what the limitations were, men in the field would exceed them. And when they did, and should those excesses come to light, Ulrich could shape the narrative away from The administration authorized torture, toward Field personnel exceeded the administration’s clear legal limits.

The plan had worked nicely to contain the damage from the Abu Ghraib photos. The question was, would it also work now, if the interrogation videos came to light?

He considered. There was an unwritten rule of American politics: the sacrifice had to be commensurate with the scandal. For Abu Ghraib, it had been enough to sacrifice a few enlisted personnel. Watergate, on the other hand, had required the resignation of a president. And the rule had an important corollary: the more the politician could invoke national security as a justification, the more the impact of the scandal could be blunted. That’s why Clinton’s blow job almost killed him, while war crimes accusations were so easy to deflect.

The question was, where along that continuum would the tapes land him? He could play the national security card, certainly. It wasn’t as though he had much else. But the Caspers… it was hard to see how even national security was going to get him around that. Yeah, the tapes alone would be a God-almighty fire, but the Caspers… the Caspers would dump gasoline onto the blaze. Against a conflagration like that, a few enlisted personnel or some field agents would be a pretty puny firebreak. Something bigger would be required. And why not him? After all, his name would be at the center of the interrogation program. He would be a big enough sacrifice to sate the public, but not too big to cause undue discomfort. Certainly the public would prefer the sacrifice of a high-level facilitator to, say, the trial of a former president and vice president, and because they would prefer it, it would be easy for everyone who might otherwise be vulnerable to make it so.

Yeah, they would come after him. And he’d make an appealing villain, too, like Jack Abramoff in his black fedora. He could imagine the descriptions already, how he’d “traded on his government service” to become a “lobbyist fat cat”… and the way his enemies would ply the media with not-for-attribution tales about his periodic outbursts at idiots, his judgment… Yeah, he knew the way it would be played. He’d played it that way dozens of times himself. Of course, knowing how the game was played and being able to defend yourself when you had become the game’s object were two different things.

He pulled the thumb drive and put it back in his safe. Well, he’d checked his insurance policy, only to discover a massive deductible. Only to realize he was the deductible.

But that was okay. He had the one other policy, the ultimate policy. The audiotapes that thank God he’d had the sense to make that morning at Arlington National-and other times, too.

But he’d play that card only if he had to. Only if he’d run out of every other option.