They got off on the third floor and were met right at the elevator by a blond man whose hair looked a little “refreshed,” wearing an expensive suit, looking a little too polished. Mr. Oakes all but ran up to Bryson, arms outstretched. “We’re grateful for Congressman Vaughan’s support!” the lobbyist exclaimed, shaking Bryson’s hand with both of his. In a confiding voice he added, “I know Congressman Vaughan understands the importance of keeping America strong, free of cheap, underpriced imports. I mean, Mauritanian fabrics — that is not what this country is about! I know the Congressman understands that.”

  “Congressman Vaughan is interested to learn more about the international labor standards bill that you’re supporting,” Bryson said, looking around as the two of them strode down the hallway that was once so familiar. Yet there were none of the old personnel, no Chris Edgecomb nor any of the others whom Bryson knew only by face. None of the communications workstations or modules, the global satellite monitors. Nothing was the same, including the office furniture. Even the floor plan had been altered, as if the entire floor had been gutted. The old small-arms storeroom was gone, replaced by a conference room with smoked-glass walls and expensive-looking mahogany table and chairs.

  The too-well-dressed lobbyist led Bryson into his corner office and invited him to sit. “We understand the Congressman is up for reelection next year,” the man said, “and we consider it vital to support those members of Congress who understand the importance of keeping America’s economy strong.”

  Bryson nodded absently, looking around. This was the office that had once belonged to Ted Waller. If there had been even an inkling of doubt, that was now vanished. This was no notional organization, no cover.

  The Directorate had vanished. There was no trace of Ted Waller, the only man who could confirm—or deny—the truth of CIA man Harry Dunne’s account of the truth behind the Directorate.

  Who’s lying? Who’s telling the truth?

  How could he reach his old employers when they had vanished off the face of the earth as if they’d never existed?

  Bryson had hit a wall.

  Twenty minutes later, Bryson had returned to the parking garage, returned to his rented vehicle, and ran through all the checks that had once been second nature to him. The tiny pressure-sensitive filament he had pressed into place along the door handle on the driver’s side was still in place, as was the filament on the passenger-side door handle; anyone who had attempted to pick the lock or otherwise gain entry to the car would have dislodged the indicators without knowing it. He knelt quickly and did a brief visual survey of the underside of the automobile, confirming that no devices had been placed there. He had not been aware of any attempts to follow him to K Street or into the parking garage, but he could no longer satisfy himself with such counter-surveillance efforts. As he started the car he felt the old familiar knot in his stomach, the ganglion of tension that hadn’t been there for several years. The moment of truth passed uneventfully; there was no ignition-triggered detonation.

  He drove down through several levels to the garage exit, where he inserted his magnetic-striped ticket into the card reader that controlled the liftgate arm. The ticket popped back out, rejected. Damn it, he muttered to himself. It was almost amusing — almost, but not quite—that for all his precautions, he would be delayed by a simple mechanical glitch. He inserted the card again; still, it failed to activate the arm. The bored-looking parking attendant came out of his booth, came up to Bryson’s open window, and said, “Let me give it a try, sir.” The attendant inserted the ticket into the machine, but still it was rejected. He glanced at the blue paper ticket, nodded with sudden understanding, and approached the car window.

  “Sir, is this the same ticket you were issued when you entered?” the attendant asked, handing it back to Bryson.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bryson said irritably. Was the attendant questioning whether this was in fact Bryson’s vehicle, whether Bryson might be trying to take someone else’s? He turned to look at the attendant and was immediately bothered by something, some aspect of the man’s hands.

  “No, sir, you’re misunderstanding me,” the attendant said, leaning in. Bryson suddenly felt the cold hard steel of a gun barrel pressed against his left temple. The attendant held a small-caliber, snub-nosed pistol to Bryson’s temple! It was insane! “I’m saying, sir, that I want you to keep both of your hands on the steering wheel,” said the attendant in a low, steady voice. “I’d rather not have to use this thing.”

  Jesus Christ!

  That was it! The hands, the manicured nails—they were the soft, well tended hands of a man who took inordinate care with his appearance, who likely traveled in exclusive, moneyed circles and had to fit in—not the hands of a parking-garage attendant. But the realization had come an instant too late! The attendant abruptly opened the car’s rear door and leaped into the backseat, the gun once again to Bryson’s temple.

  “Let’s go! Move it!” shouted the fake attendant, just as the barrier lifted. “Don’t remove those hands from the wheel. I’d hate to slip, pull the trigger by accident, you know? Let’s go for a little drive, you and me. Get some fresh air.”

  Bryson, having stowed his weapon in his glove compartment, had no choice but to drive out of the garage and onto K Street, following the false attendant’s directions. As the car entered traffic, Bryson felt the gun barrel cut into the flesh of his left temple, and he heard the low, steady, conversational banter of the man behind him.

  “You knew this day was going to come, didn’t you?” the professional said. “Odds are it’ll happen to all of us at some point. You overstep, go a little too far. Push when you should have pulled. Stick your nose into something that’s no longer your business.”

  “Care to fill me in on where we’re going?” Bryson said, trying to keep his voice light. His heart hammered, his mind raced. He added, as an aside, “Mind if I put on the news …?” He casually reached out his right hand for the radio knob, then felt the pistol’s barrel slam into his head as the hit man roared, “Goddamn you, get those hands back on the wheel!”

  “Jesus!” Bryson exclaimed as the pain spread. “Watch it!”

  The killer had no idea that Bryson’s Glock was nestled against the base of his spine, in his rear waist holster. But he was not going to take any chances.

  Then how to retrieve it? The hit man—for he was a hit man, Bryson knew, a professional, whether on the Directorate payroll or a contract employee—insisted that Bryson keep his hands visible at all times. Now he had to follow instructions, waiting for a moment of distraction on the part of the hit man. The earmarks were in everything about the man: the confident plan of action; the quick, efficient moves; even the glib speech.

  “Let’s just say we’re going someplace outside the Beltway, someplace where a couple of guys can talk freely.” But talking, Bryson realized grimly, was the last thing on the hit man’s agenda. “A couple of guys in the same business who just happen to be on different ends of a gun, that’s all. It’s nothing personal, I’m sure you realize that. Strictly business. One minute you’re looking through the sights, next minute you’re looking at the barrel. Happens. The wheel’s always turning. I’m sure you were very good in your time, which is why I have no doubt you’re going to take this like a man.”

  Bryson, considering his options, didn’t reply. He’d been in roughly similar circumstances countless times before, though never, except during his early training days, on the other side of a pistol. He knew how the man in the seat behind him was thinking right now, the way the flow chart was patterned: if A, then B … How a sudden move on Bryson’s part, a direction ignored, the steering wheel spun in the wrong direction, would initiate a countermeasure. The hit man would try to avoid pulling the trigger while they were in traffic, for fear the vehicle might careen out of control, imperiling both men. This familiarity with the options available to his enemy was one of the few cards Bryson had to play.

  Yet at the same time Bryson was quite aware that the man would not hesitate to fire directly into Bryson’s head if he had to, lunging forward to grab and steady the steering wheel. Bryson didn’t like the odds.

  Now they were crossing the Key Bridge. “Left,” the man barked, indicating the direction of Reagan National Airport. Bryson obeyed, careful to seem compliant, resigned, the better to put the other man off his guard.

  “Now take this exit,” the killer resumed. The exit would take them toward the area immediately outside the airport where most of the rentalcar agencies had offices.

  “You could have done me back there at the parking garage,” Bryson muttered. “You should have, actually.”

  But the hit man was too skilled to be drawn into a discussion of tactics or to allow Bryson to challenge his competence. Obviously the expert had been fully briefed as to the nature of Bryson’s mind, how Bryson would likely react in such a circumstance. “Oh, don’t even try that,” the professional said with a low chuckle. “You saw all the videocams back there, the potential witnesses. You know better than that. You wouldn’t have done it there either, I’ll bet. Not based on what I hear about your skills.”

  A slip there, Bryson reflected. The man was definitely a contract employee, an outsider, which meant any backup was unlikely. He would be operating on his own. A Directorate staffer would be protected by others. This was a valuable piece of data to store away.

  Bryson steered the car into a deserted, vacant parking area, the far end of what was once a used-car lot. He parked as instructed. He turned his head to his right to address the other man, then felt the barrel of the gun grind painfully into his temple: the professional made no secret of his displeasure. “Don’t move,” came the steely voice. Turning his head back around, staring straight ahead, Bryson said, “Why don’t you at least make this quick?”

  “So now you’re feeling the way the other guys felt,” said the professional, amused. “The fear, the sense of futility, of hopelessness. Of resignation.”

  “You’re waxing entirely too philosophical for me. I’ll bet you don’t even know who’s issuing your checks.”

  “Beyond the fact that they clear, I don’t really care.”

  “No matter who they are, what they do,” said Bryson quietly. “No matter whether they’re working against the U.S. or not.”

  “Like I said, so long as the checks clear. I don’t do politics.”

  “That’s a pretty short-term way of thinking.”

  “We’re in a short-term business.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” Bryson let a moment of silence pass. “Not if we come to mutually agreeable terms. We all lock some away; it’s expected of us. Discretionary accounts, reimbursed expenses, overstated of course—a percentage of our expense allowance salted away, laundered clean, invested in the market. Put your money to work for you. I’m willing to put some of it to work for me right now.”

  “To buy your own life,” the professional said solemnly. “But you seem to forget that my livelihood goes beyond one transaction. You may be one account, but they’re the entire goddamned bank. And you don’t bet against the house.”

  “No, you don’t bet against the house,” Bryson agreed. “You just report back that the mark was even better than you’d been led to believe, more skilled. Managed to escape, Jesus, the guy’s good. They’re not going to doubt you on that; it’s what they want to believe anyway. You’ll still keep your retainer, your deposit, and I’ll double the contract amount. Sound business practice, my friend.”

  “Accounts are watched very carefully these days, Bryson. It’s not like when you were in the game. Money is digital, and digital transactions leave tracks.”

  “Cash doesn’t leave tracks, not if it’s unsequenced.”

  “Everything leaves tracks these days, and you know it. Sorry, I’ve got a job to do. And in this case, it’s facilitating suicide. You have a history of depression, you know. You had no personal life to speak of, and the groves of academe could never compare to the excitement of spy work. Your clinical depression was diagnosed by a top-rank psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist—”

  “Sorry, the only shrinks I’ve ever seen were government-issue, years ago.”

  “A few days ago, according to your health-insurance records,” replied the killer, a grim smile in his voice. “You’ve been seeing a shrink for over a year.”

  “That’s bullshit!”

  “Anything’s possible in this day and age of the computerized database. Pharmacy records, too—antidepressants prescribed for you, purchased by you, along with antianxiety drugs, sleeping pills. It’ll all be there. A suicide note left on your home computer, too, I’m told.”

  “Suicide notes are almost always handwritten, never typed or computer generated.”

  “Granted—we’ve both set up hits to look like suicides, I’m sure. But believe me, no one’s ever going to dig into this that far. There’ll be no postmortems for you. You have no family to request an autopsy.”

  The professional’s words, though no doubt prescripted, still wounded, because they were the truth: he had no family, not since Elena had left. Not since my parents were killed by the Directorate, he added to himself bitterly.

  “But let me say, I’m honored to be given this assignment,” the hit man resumed. “They say you were one of the top field men, after all.”

  “Why do you think you were assigned?” Bryson said.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. A job’s a job.”

  “You think you’re expected to survive it? You think they want you around telling tales? Who knows how much might have told you? You think you’re going to survive this last job?”

  “I don’t really give a shit,” said the man unconvincingly.

  “No, I don’t think your employers ever planned to let you live,” Bryson went on, grimly. “Who the hell knows what I spilled to you?”

  “What are you trying to say?” asked the hit man after a moment of uncomfortable silence. He seemed to hesitate for an instant; Bryson could feel the grinding pressure of the pistol barrel momentarily let up. It was all the opportunity he needed, this second or two of genuine indecision on the part of his intended assassin. Quietly, he slipped his left hand off the steering wheel and slithered it down around to his back. He had the Glock! With lightning speed he pointed it toward the back of his seat and, firing blind, squeezed the trigger again and again in quick succession. Three rapid explosions filled the car’s interior as the large-caliber bullets pierced the seat cushions, the noise ear-shattering. Had he hit the man? In an instant he got his answer as the barrel of the pistol fell away from the back of his head. Bryson spun around, whipping his pistol around, too, as he did so, and he realized that the man was dead, half of his forehead blown away.

  They met at Langley this time, in Dunne’s seventh-floor office in the Agency’s new building. Standard security procedures were bypassed; Bryson was admitted to CIA headquarters with a minimum of ceremony.

  “Why does it not surprise me the Directorate boys declared you beyond salvage?” Harry Dunne said with a hoarse laugh that became a sustained hacking cough. “I just think they must have forgotten who they were dealing with.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that you’re better than anyone they can send after you, Bryson. For Christ’s sake, you’d think those fucking cowboys would know that by now.”

  “They also know they don’t want me in this office, in this building, spilling my guts.”

  “Wish you had anything to spill,” replied Dunne. “But they knew how to keep all of you isolated, atomized. You don’t know real names, just legends, and a fat lot of good that does us. Legends that are, or were, internal to the Directorate yield nothing in our own in-house data search. Like this ‘Prospero’ you keep mentioning.”

  “I told you, that’s all I knew him as. Plus, it was over fifteen years ago. In the field, that’s a geological era. Prospero was, I believe, Dutch, or at least of Dutch origins. Very resourceful operative.”

  “The best Agency sketch artists have produced a drawing based on your description, and we’re trying to match the image against stored photographs, sketches, verbal descriptions. But the artificial-intelligence software still hasn’t advanced enough yet. It’s arduous, hit-or-miss work. So far we’ve had just one hit, as the digital hard-disk jockeys like to say. A fellow you said you worked with in Shanghai on a particularly sensitive exfiltration case.”

  “Sigma.”

  “Ogilvy. Frank Ogilvy, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. Or maybe I should say, late of Hilton Head.”

  “Moved? Transferred?”

  “A crowded beach, a hot day. Seven years ago. Keeled over from a massive heart attack, apparently. Caused a minor commotion on the boardwalk that day, one witness told us, so crowded and all.”

  Bryson sat quietly for a moment, examining the windowless walls of Dunne’s office, contemplating. Abruptly he said, “If you’re looking for ants, go find yourself a picnic.”

  “Come again?” Dunne was once again absently shredding a cigarette.

  “That was one of Waller’s sayings. If you’re looking for ants, go find yourself a picnic. Instead of looking for them where they were, we need to figure out where they are. Ask yourself: What do they need? What kind of spread are they in the mood for?”

  Dunne put down the ruined cigarette and looked up, suddenly alert. “Weaponry, the word is. Seems they’re trying to stockpile an arsenal. We think they’re instigating some kind of turbulence in the southern Balkans, although their ultimate target is elsewhere.”

  “Weaponry.” Something was turning in Nick’s mind.

  “Guns and ammo. But sophisticated stuff.” Dunne shrugged. “Things that go boom in the night. When the bombs and bullets start flying, your own generals always start to look more appealing. Whatever they’re hatching, we’ve got to put an end to it. By whatever means.”

  “‘Whatever means’?”