“Any problem finding the place?” I ask as I grab him a beer. It’s the first in a sequence of questions I’ll ask more formally at the start of every meeting once he’s fully recruited. They go by an acronym: STINC, which stands for Security (Any run-ins with the local service on your way here?), Time (How long do we have?), Intelligence (Any

On the way back, Jon stops me in the hall. “Doesn’t look to me like you’re too into this one,” he says. “Yeah, well, guess that’s the service part of service,” I laugh. “Nope,” he says, “the service part of service is doing the thing you’re called to do.”

“Dr. Khan committed his life to leveling the playing field,” he says in precise English. “He saw his country humiliated by India on the battlefield. Then he himself was humiliated by an Indian soldier on a train crossing the Pakistani border. The soldier took his favorite pen. It wasn’t a big thing. But he did it because he could get away with it.”

“What about you?” he asks. “How did you come to be in this mess?” “Wanted to make sure every voice gets heard,” I say. I’ve started playing a game with myself to see how long I can go without lying to a target. Withholding information is unavoidable—for their security as well as mine—but I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding outright falsehoods. In

Aum Shinrikyo, the apocalyptic cult that choked Tokyo subway commuters with sarin gas in 1995, turned out to have nearly a billion dollars in the bank and a uranium-mining operation in Australia—

One instructor prefers using Starbucks gift cards. They have a balance he can check by typing the card number into the Starbucks website. He gives one to each of his assets and tells them, “If you need to see me, buy a coffee.” Then he checks the card numbers on a cybercafé computer each day, and if the balance on one is depleted, he knows he’s got

The fear injects my thoughts with venom. Beltway BS. No wonder we’re losing this war. Bunch of risk-averse desk jockeys calling the shots. The taxi jerks to a stop at an intersection, and I look up. The plastic back of the driver’s seat is covered in graffiti. Most of it is in Urdu. Some is in Arabic. One creased sticker off to the side is in

I think of the time I saw a banker repossessing a home drop a woman’s house keys into the garbage. Her kid had made the key ring. It clanged when it hit the metal base. A few months later, I read a newspaper article about a banker’s murder, and part of me understood. Ants flee the stomping boot of power. Until, one day, they don’

After he leaves, I fold the document into pleats, like the geisha fans we used to make in elementary school. Then I set the accordion on its end atop the toilet bowl water and light it on fire. It’s an old Russia House trick to keep the smoke to a minimum and contain the ash. When our agreement is converted to floating black flakes, I flush and set