“I’m sure that even Cy could find a use for Weaver’s skill set,” Irwin said, then gave him a nod of greeting and wandered out again.

Later, walking to the lunch he’d promised Stuart Fossum, he used his personal phone to call two Tourists. Practicing bad security, he’d scribbled their six-digit go-codes on scrap paper before leaving the office, and read them off. One Tourist he recalled from Bolivia, the other from Mauritania.

He paid for the lunch-Fossum’s insistence on seared Kobe beef with a truffled herb salad made the expensive meal ludicrous-with his own credit card. His guest handed over the folder of seven files without a word, then launched into an extended harangue about the CIA. Drummond played along with it, but cut the meal short when his phone rang and he was called back to the office. In fact, it was Milo who called. Sticking to their prearranged signal, Milo said, “Did you talk to your friend Gallagher yet?”

“Not yet. Later in the afternoon.”

“Look, I put together a CV last night that I think you should show him. Little more fleshed out. Can I bring it by now?”

“I’m not in the office.”

“Can we meet at the Staples in Herald Square? I’m heading there to do up a copy. Then I’m off to Jersey.”

“Not staying at home anymore?”

“Just meet me, will you?”

He hopped a bus to Thirty-fourth, three blocks north of the office, and found Weaver in the hectic, crowded store, sitting on a bench with an open knapsack full of stapled sheets. Drummond settled beside him, his open briefcase between them, and started leafing through one of the copies. He was almost surprised to receive an actual CV for Milo Weaver, with dates and fake CIA departments listed, charting a fictional but appropriately slow career advancement. While he read through it, unfolding pages in an elaborate and noisy game of distraction, Weaver removed the seven FBI files from his briefcase and slipped them into his knapsack.

As they went about their ruse, Drummond tried to get a sense of who among the crowd were Weaver’s shadows. The blond girl with the pigtails and the backpack? The biker with the handlebar mustache? The effeminate male duo holding posters for a rave? He had no idea.

Weaver was already getting up, telling him he didn’t need advice on the CV. He just needed a job. “You get that to Gallagher and let me do the rest, okay?”

“Sure, Milo. I’ll do just that.”

When he returned to the office, he gave Saeed Atassi the go-ahead to leak his Tour Guide, then went to Harry Lynch’s cubicle. The nervous Travel Agent looked terrified by the personal visit. Drummond squatted beside him. “Harry, I hear you’re a whiz with the machines.”

“I’m all right, sir.”

“Well, I need a little wizardry. Soon you’re going to see Tourists Klein and Jones start to move. They’re coming here. Is there a way you can arrange it so that no one else knows?”

A smile appeared on Harry Lynch’s face.

In alphabetical order, they were:

Derek Abbott (Legislative Assistant)

Jane Chan (Scheduler)

Maximilian Grzybowski (Chief of Staff)

William Howington (Legislative Assistant)

Susan Jackson (Press Secretary)

David Pearson (Legislative Director)

Raymond Salamon (Legislative Assistant)

It was a small staff by congressional standards, most of the legwork accomplished by a disproportionately large army of interns. What that meant, Milo realized, was that each staff member had a larger share of the federal administrative and clerical employee allowance-and a senator that paid better than others knew he was buying loyalty.

Each of the seven was represented by a manila folder he laid out on the card table in the dusty safe house on Grand Concourse, across from Franz Sigel Park. It was nearly five, and he’d spent the hours after his meeting with Drummond on four different forms of transport, leading his shadows over into New Jersey and then evading them by bus, boat, taxi, and back alleys before doubling back by bus via the George Washington Bridge and heading up to the Bronx. With the evening came a chilly breeze that leaked in through the fire-escape window he’d broken in order to get inside, then covered with cardboard from a still-full crate of toilet paper. Only now could he begin to go through the files.

Each contained biographical information. The one whose name he had obviously zeroed in on, Jane Chan, did still have family in the old country, but in Hong Kong, not the mainland. Still, since China’s takeover in 1997, it wasn’t inconceivable the Guoanbu had made her family’s continued safety contingent on its American relative’s cooperation.

Of the rest, Chinese connections were either unknown or, in three cases, tangential. Derek Abbott had previously worked for Representative Lester Wharton of Illinois, until Wharton was arrested for receiving gifts from the Chinese honorary consul in Chicago, in exchange for trade legislation.

Susan Jackson had studied Chinese culture in college and was semifluent in Mandarin-which made little difference when she was arrested in Beijing in 2005 for joining with farmers to protest their land being taken to make room for the Olympic Stadium. China had since denied her any more visas.

David-Dave, he remembered-Pearson had visited Shanghai twice in the last decade for vacations with a Chinese girlfriend he had since broken up with and whose calls he avoided entirely.

At eight, Drummond called to ask if he was making any progress with his job search, and he gave a halfhearted yes but pointed out that there were still too many options. “Well, narrow it down,” Drummond said, stating the obvious.

“I could do that,” he answered, “but that doesn’t mean my criteria are any good.” The job search metaphor wasn’t perfect, but with a little imagination it could work.

“Maybe you need some help.”

“You got anyone?”

“A couple of guys who specialize in placements. They should be in touch by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thanks, Alan.”

He put together a dinner of what the safe house had available: canned cannellini beans, frozen stir-fry vegetables, and rice. For some reason there was no salt in the apartment, so he made do with a bottle of soy sauce.

As he ate his heavy, bland meal, he felt a wave of doubt. What did he really have? An inconsistency between stories. A time problem. That was all he really had, in the end. He was acting like Henry Gray, starting with a conspiracy and rereading all the known facts so that they fit his theory. It was bad journalism; it was bad intelligence.

Not only were his clues scarce, but he began to question his own motives. Was he really through with Nathan Irwin? Or was his unconscious taking charge now, creating phantoms in order to target the senator?

He really didn’t know. Regardless, though they were scarce, the facts did exist, and even Drummond agreed they should be looked into.

The files, he realized with some despair, would tell him nothing. There were three primary ways of gaining an asset in a competing agency: threats, bribery, and ideology. No matter the aides’ connections to China, Xin Zhu could have visited any of them with blackmail material, an offer of money, or even an appeal to their political philosophy. Ever since the start of the Iraq War, plenty of Company men and women had grown disillusioned with their own employer. Even Milo had had enough, making him a prime candidate for some other country’s attentions-so why not some senatorial aide?

So if the mole couldn’t be discovered, it had to be provoked into showing itself.

To provoke a mole into showing itself would require his complete involvement.

Though he wanted to believe otherwise, he was already involved. He’d been neck deep in it ever since he chose to sit down and read that extensive file on Xin Zhu, and he voluntarily submerged himself when he brought the story to Drummond. He’d even stepped out of his own life to look into it, while Irwin’s thugs kept trying to track him.