"Are you sure it was suicide?"

"There's nothing to suggest otherwise. Unless you know something else you're not telling me."

Milo stared at the white surface of the table, his breaths audible, thinking. What was he thinking about?

She said, "There's one thing I only figured out late Saturday night, probably around the time Fitzhugh died. It does kind of throw everything into question, and I'd planned on following up on it today."

"What's that?"

"The day after you came back to the Avenue of the Americas, Fitzhugh received an anonymous package-that Russian passport of yours. It was real, but the question he never answered was: Who sent it?"

"I'd like to know that, too."

She smiled. "But you already know, don't you? Your father, Yevgeny Primakov. He sent it so that, if I wasn't already, I would start to question your entire history, find your grandfather, and be led to Yevgeny himself."

Milo didn't answer. He just waited.

"It was smart. I'll admit that. He could've sent it to me directly, but he knew I wouldn't trust an anonymous package. Instead, he sent it to Terence, knowing he would be happy to share it. Terence thought it would bury you, but it did the opposite. It led me to Primakov, who just happened to have a photograph of Terence with Roman Ugrimov-Roman, who just happened to be in town, too. Amazing coincidence, don't you think?"

"I think you're imagining conspiracies, Janet."

"Maybe I am," she said agreeably, because a part of her wanted to believe that that's all it was-her imagination. Like Milo weeks before, she didn't like the feeling that she'd been led by the nose. Still, she knew it was true. "There's a certain beauty to it," she said. "Your father sends something that has the potential to expose you as a Russian spy, but instead it leads to evidence condemning Fitzhugh. Your father must love you very much to stick his neck out like that."

"That's ridiculous," said Milo. "How could he know that you'd follow that exact path?"

"Because," she said quickly, the answer already on her lips, "your father knew-if only because you told him-just how bad the relationship between Homeland and the Company is. He knew that if I smelled a mole, I would start to dig deep in order to squeeze the Company. As it turned out, they never had a mole, just an agent with a secret childhood."

Milo considered all this while staring at his cuffed hands. "Maybe that's possible, Janet-in your paranoid world, at least-but you never got enough to really nail Fitzhugh, did you? It was all circumstantial stuff. Yet Fitzhugh still shot himself. No one could predict that."

"If he really shot himself."

"I thought you believed he did."

"Fitzhugh," said Simmons, "was too much of an old fox to do that. He would've fought every step of the way.”

“So, who killed him?"

"Who knows? Maybe your father took care of that. Or maybe my investigation was making someone above Fitzhugh nervous. He made it very clear in his note that the buck stopped with him. You believe that? Do you believe that Fitzhugh was just a rogue administrator who decided to destabilize African countries in order to disrupt China's oil supply?"

Milo's shoulders slumped in an attitude of dejection. "I don't know what to think, Janet."

"Then maybe you can answer a question."

"You know me, Janet. I'm always happy to help."

"What did you do during that week in Albuquerque?"

"Like I said, I drank. I drank and ate and shat and thought. Then I took a plane to New York City."

"Yeah," she said, standing. She'd had enough of this. "That's what I thought you'd say."

He knew from the beginning how it would end, despite all the fear and doubt brought on by the strict prison regimen. It was tailor-made to encourage doubt in anything involving the outside world, even an old Russian fox. The prison said: At this hour, you wake; at that hour, you eat. Midday is time for physical exercise in the Yard. In the Yard, your mind may begin to wander outside the walls, to postulate and speculate on what might be happening at that very moment, but you're soon disrupted by the minutiae of prison socialization. A Latino gang suggests basketball isn't your game, a black gang tells you this is its bleacher. The skinheads explain that you'll run with them, because you're a brother; you're white. If, as Milo did, you reject them all out of hand, claiming that you belong to none of their cliques, then your wandering mind is again sucked back inside the walls, devoted to staying alive.

Over the first three weeks of Milo 's month-and-a-half incarceration, there were three attempts on his life. One was by a bald fascist who thought his hands were weapons enough, until Milo crushed them in the bars of a neighbor's door. On two separate occasions others came at him with knives made of sharpened dining utensils, while their friends held Milo still. They landed him in the infirmary with his chest, thighs, and buttocks marked up.

Two days later, the second attacker, previously a hired fist for a

Newark crime syndicate, was discovered dead-quietly suffocated, not a print on him-under the black gang's bleachers. A wall of silence sprang up around Milo Weaver. He was a thorn in their side, they said among themselves, but sometimes it's best to just let a thorn stay where it is, lest it start to infect.

Periodically, Special Agent Janet Simmons came to visit. She wanted to verify details in his story, sometimes about his father, sometimes focusing on Tripplehorn, whose body had been discovered in the Kittatinny mountain range, west of Lake Hopatcong. He asked about Tina and Stephanie, and she always said that they were fine. Why didn't they come to see him? Simmons became uncomfortable. "I think Tina feels it would be difficult for Stephanie to take."

After three weeks, while he was resting in the infirmary to repair some wound or other, Tina finally came. The nurse wheeled him out to the visitation room, and they talked through phones, separated by bulletproof plastic.

Despite the circumstances (or because of them? he wondered), she looked good. She'd lost a few pounds, and that accentuated her cheekbones in a way he'd never seen before. He kept touching the separator window, but she wouldn't be lured into this mawkish expression of desire. When she spoke, it was as if she were reading from a prepared statement.

"I don't understand any of this, Milo. I don't pretend to. One moment you tell everyone that you murdered Tom, and the next moment Janet Simmons tells me you didn't. Which one is the lie, Milo?"

"I didn't kill Tom. That's the truth."

She grinned. Perhaps the answer was a relief; he couldn't tell anything from her face. She said, "You know, the funny thing is that I could take that. If you killed Stephanie's godfather, I really could take it. I've kept a big store of faith in you for many years, and I could believe that you killed him for the best of reasons. I could believe murder was justified. You see? That's faith. But this other thing. Your father. Father, Milo. Jesus!" Whatever prepared statement she had was crumbling now. "How fucking long were you going to wait to tell me about this? How long before Stephanie found out she had a grandfather?"

"I'm sorry about that," he said. "It's just… I've lied about it since I was a kid. I lied to the Company. After a while, it was as good as the truth to me."

There were tears in her eyes, but she wasn't crying. She wouldn't let herself break down, not in the visiting room of a prison in New Jersey. "That's not good enough. You understand? It's just not good enough."