On the seventh floor of the Hart Building, the two men sat at a desk across from each other, and tried to size each other up.

There was no alternative. Senator Kirk’s chief of staff wanted to know whether Belknap could be trusted. What he could not know was how hard Belknap had been struggling with the question of whether Kirk could be trusted. The operative had scanned Nexis, read the standard profiles and biographical sketches, and tried to form an image in his mind. Without access to Cons Ops files, he was handicapped. The facts only went so far. Kirk had been born in South Bend, into a prosperous farming family. He attended public schools, was president of the student council, played hockey and football, attended Purdue, got a law degree from the University of Chicago, clerked for a Federal circuit judge, and returned to Indiana to take a job at a law school in South Bend. Four years later, he was elected Indiana’s secretary of state, and then lieutenant governor, before making a Senate run. For Kirk, the first time was a charm. He served on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committees, the Subcommittee on International Trade and Finance, the Armed Services Committee, and, by the beginning of his most recent term of office, had become the ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

That was why Todd Belknap had decided to do the one thing that only he could do: tell the truth. Once again, he would sneak in through the front door.

Now Philip Sutton leaned forward across his cluttered desk. “Everything you’ve said so far checks out. You said they’re trying to shitcan you. The record says you’re on administrative leave. Time of recruitment, duration of service—it’s all on the money.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Belknap said. “It’s kind of a manipulation, you could say. I figure if I tell you the truth, the honest, verifiable truth, you’ll come to trust me a little.”

A half-grin spread across Sutton’s jowly mouth. “Honesty? I’m in politics. That’s a filthy lowdown trick that we only rarely resort to.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures,” Belknap said. “Does your record search include any reference to ‘administrative retrieval’?”

Sutton’s expression told him the answer to his question.

“You know what it means, don’t you?”

“I can guess. This part of your total-candor strategy?”

“You got it. Including fessing up about the strategy.”

Sutton let his professional bonhomie evaporate; his eyes bore in. “Talk to me about Genesis.”

“I’d be glad to, with the senator’s permission,” Belknap said slyly.

Sutton got up and padded down the hall, surprisingly light on his feet for someone of his girth. He returned quickly, made a summoning gesture. “The senator will see you now.”

At the end of a short hallway of narrow offices was Bennett Kirk’s own office. It was large, filled with dark wooden furniture that had undoubtedly been floating around the Senate since the Gilded Age, and, unlike the rooms occupied by administrative assistants, double-height. Sunlight filtered gently through vast sheer curtains.

Senator Bennett Kirk—tall and loose-limbed, with the unmistakable mane of silver hair—was already standing when Belknap came in, and he took his measure with the speed and acuity of a seasoned pol. Belknap could feel Kirk’s gray eyes roam over his face, probing, assessing, searching. There was a glint of something relenting—a glint of approval, even. His handclasp was firm but not showily so.

“Glad you could see me, Senator,” said Belknap. Up close, he thought he saw something almost haggard in the older man’s distinguished countenance—not tiredness so much as the effort of concealing tiredness.

“What have you got to tell me, Mr. Belknap? I’m all ears. Well, quite a bit of mouth, too.”

Belknap smiled, charmed by the man’s down-to-earth style despite himself, and despite the seriousness of his mission. “Let’s not bullshit each other. Genesis was my open sesame. That was the word that got me through the door.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Belknap snapped. “I’m not here to play gin rummy.”

Kirk’s eyes were wary. “Then let’s see what cards you got.”

The senator and his chief of staff exchanged glances. There was a hint of I told you so in the exchange, but Belknap couldn’t have said who told whom what. “Go on,” said the politician, his voice taut. “What do you know about him?”

Belknap sat up very straight and told him the stories that he had heard.

After a few minutes, Senator Kirk cut him off. “Sounds like tinfoil-hat stuff, doesn’t it?”

“If you thought so, you wouldn’t have let me in.”

“Truth is, we’ve heard these stories, too—or some of them, anyway. Sourcing’s poor across the board.”

“I grant you that.”

“But you say you’ve been directly threatened by Genesis. How?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. Belknap exhaled heavily and told him, in abbreviated form, about what had just happened in Cyprus. “I am counting our conversation as privileged,” the operative emphasized.

“That goes without saying.”

“It goes better with saying.”

“I understand,” Bennett Kirk said with a genial smile that did not reach his eyes. “Just what do you know about this Genesis?”

“I’ve done a lot of talking already,” Belknap said carefully. “What do you know about him?”

Kirk turned away. “What do you think, Phil? Think it’s time to open our kimonos?” The words were bantering, but his tone was edged with apprehension.

Sutton shrugged.

“Would you like his name, address, and Social Security number?” the senator asked.

Belknap stared. “Yes.”

“You knew this since before we started to talk.”

“You said it yourself: Our conversation is privileged. But you can appeal to me in my role as the head of the Senate Committee on Intelligence. I’ve got to appeal to you as a man, and as an American. Can I do that?” He broke off.

“Privilege goes both ways. Frankly, Senator, I have so many of this nation’s secrets in my head that talk of clearance is a bureaucratic absurdity. Not to put too fine a point on it, I am one of those secrets. I’ve spent my career in and out of special-access programs.”

Sutton gave the senator a sidelong glance. “You make a good point,” he said to Belknap.

“Fact of the matter is,” Kirk said, “all our communications from Genesis have been via e-mail. Strictly untraceable, or so they assure me. There’s the sign-off; there’s information that’s often fragmentary and sometimes less so. But he’s never been more than a byline to me. You ask whether I’m being used. How can I answer that? Functionally, the role he’s performing is that of a confidential informant—only with an extraordinary knowledge of an extraordinary range of activities. There’s always the threat of disinformation, but we take nothing at face value. Either the info checks out or it doesn’t. Other possibilities? Score-settling? Sure. Every investigation is propelled by people leaking dirt on their enemies for self-interested purposes. So what’s new? That doesn’t make the revelations any less valuable as far as the public interest is concerned.” The logic was dry, hard, and difficult to dispute.

“It doesn’t bother you that you have no idea who your chief informant is?”

“Of course it does,” Sutton growled. “That’s not the point. You can’t order what’s not on the menu.”

“So you don’t care that you’re dealing with the devil.”

“The devil you don’t know?” Sutton raised an eyebrow. “You’re being dramatic. Try being specific.”

“Fine,” Belknap said, tight-lipped. “Has it occurred to you that Genesis might be an alias for Paul Bancroft?”

The senator and his chief of staff exchanged glances again. “If that’s what you think,” Kirk said, “you’re dead wrong.”

“You’ve mixed up the cat and the mouse,” Sutton added. “Genesis is Bancroft’s mortal enemy.”

Belknap paused. “You’ve been informed about the Theta Group?” He was groping, disoriented.

“So you know about that, too,” said the senator after a pause. “The picture we’ve got is still preliminary. But Genesis is collecting information. Within a few days, we should have enough to proceed with.”

“You don’t mess with something as powerful and august as the Bancroft Foundation,” Sutton explained, “unless you’ve got bandoliers draped over both shoulders.”

“I understand.”

“Glad one of us does,” said Senator Kirk.

Another moment of silence fell. Each sought to reveal as little as possible while learning as much as possible: It was a delicate balance.

“You say these e-mails are untraceable,” Belknap began.

Sutton stepped in: “Untraceable is right. And please don’t talk about a trap-and-trace—believe me, we’ve already looked into the situation. The thing goes through an anonymizer—one of those special routing services that strip off all the identifying codes, all the ISP digits and so on. Impossible to track back any further. That’s a high-level assurance.”

“Show me,” Belknap said simply.

Belknap looked at the nearly blank paper.

“Not a real chatty fellow,” Belknap grunted.

“You know about SMTP?” Sutton asked. “I didn’t, either, before this thing came up. But I’ve picked up a thing or two.”

“It’s all Greek to me,” the senator said, with a smile. He walked over to the window as Sutton cleared his throat.

“It’s like the e-mail postal service,” the pasty-faced aide explained. “Or the software equivalent. Usually it gives you the return address. But here, it’s like it’s been remailed, by some anonymizer in the Caribbean, and that’s the end of the story. As to how it got to this anonymous remailer? Anybody’s guess. You can put all these number under a goddamn electron microscope. Doesn’t matter. This is the most uninformative piece of paper you’ll ever come across.”

Belknap folded the sheet of paper and inserted it in his pocket. “In that case, you won’t mind if I take it with me.”

“It’s a gesture of good faith,” Sutton said. “We’re moved by your candor. Your desperation. Call it that.” That wasn’t quite it; Belknap knew that Sutton was as almost as eager to identify their informant as he was.

“It’s not the usual valedictory endeavor of an aging politician, is that what you’re saying?” A smile played across his age-etched face. “Yep, I’m a regular South Bend Cincinnatus, aren’t I? Politicians always talk about serving their country. That’s the rhetoric: public service. But we’re not all lying, at least not all of the time. Most people in Congress are highly competitive people. They’re here because they like to win, and they like to win in public, and they’re out of high school and you’ve got to figure out another way to get this aside from being student-body president or making a long pass on the gridiron. They’re temperamentally impatient, disinclined to put their head down for ten or fifteen years, which is what it takes to really make it to the top in banking or law. So they end up here. But the place changes you, Belknap. It does, or it can.”

“For the worse, in a lot of cases.”

“In a lot of cases, sure.” The senator shifted in his seat, and Belknap thought he saw a fleeting grimace. “But what we do, and ultimately who we are, is determined less by character than by circumstances. I didn’t always think that. But it’s what I think now. Winston Churchill was a great man. He would always have been an immensely talented one, whatever the course of history. But he was great because circumstances called him to be, and because they called upon something he richly possessed. He got Germany right. But he got India wrong, never got that Britain’s colonial subjects wanted to be citizens, and of their own country. The same sort of single-mindedness that protected him from appeasement and temporizing in one case stopped him from rightful and just compromise and concession in another. But forgive me. I’m speechifying, aren’t I?”

“You’re good at it.”

“Still, why you?” Belknap persisted.

Sutton himself looked at the senator expectantly, seemingly wondering how he would answer.

Bennett Kirk was smiling; his eyes were not. “If not me, who?”

Belknap had left the senator’s suite and was halfway down the hallway toward the elevators when he realized that something was amiss. How? Belknap could not have said: The awareness was beneath the level of conscious knowledge.

The Hart Building was constructed around a central atrium, a sort of internal courtyard, with elevator banks to either side; and when he walked out of the duplex suite, he caught a quick glimpse of the Calder mobile. But that was not what caught his attention. Fingertips will pick up the slightest irregularity in an otherwise smooth surface, and the focus of a trained and field-seasoned operative had precisely that kind of sensitivity. The presence of four uniformed National Guardsmen in the lobby where there had been two. The men who were stationed on several floors at the railing that faced the atrium—civilians only at first glance; plainclothes operatives at a second. The slightly oversized jacket, the too-vigilant gaze, the casual act—a passerby admiring the vast Calder mobile—prolonged beyond the casual.

A dragnet, then. One that was still in formation.

Had Senator Kirk or his chief of staff sounded the alert, after all? That wasn’t credible to him. Neither had betrayed the slightest vibration of excitement or apprehension; nobody in the suite of connected offices had. There had to be another explanation. The operating assumption had to be that a visual identification had taken place; yet his specific destination was plainly not known to those who would apprehend him. Therefore he had been detected while in the lobby. They knew he was in the building. They did not know exactly where. If he had any chance of escaping the dragnet, he would have to take that into account and make use of it.

And soon—the odds were already against him, and they got worse with every passing minute. He visualized his position as if in an aerial photograph. The seventh floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. A vast parking lot across the street, to the north on C Street. A wedge-like block carved out by Maryland Avenue to the south. To the west, the landscape was one of parks and hulking capital buildings; to the east, buildings and blocks grew smaller and less grand, becoming interspersed with apartments and stores. Now, if you could just strap on a rocket pack and fly…

He reviewed other options: Could he prompt an evacuation of the building by pulling a fire alarm, phoning in a bomb threat, or starting a trash-can fire, and then try to vanish into the panicked crowds? But that was exactly the sort of countermaneuver they would be prepared for. The fire exits would be guarded from outside; a high-level security protocol would circumvent efforts to activate a building-wide alarm. Security officers would do their own investigation first before any evacuation proceeded.

Which left the briefcase itself to be disposed of. When he was in business drag, the briefcase complemented his disguise. Now it was utterly incongruous. He emerged from the stall quickly, keeping his face turned away from the row of mirrors in front of the washbasins, and reached a wide circular trash receptacle near the door to the hallway. Glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, he dropped the case inside and then covered it with a wadding of brown paper towels. It would not be found anytime soon.

Now he strode down the hallway, taking care to put on a bit of a strut: the stride of a man on duty, on display, not someone in a rush. He took the staircase at the far west, the wall adjoining the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The staircase had none of the modernist grandeur of the semicircular stairs that rose from the atrium, but they were wide, as required by the fire code. At the landing of the fourth floor he saw another guardsman, standing post. A light-skinned black man with a smooth-shaven head that did not conceal an advanced case of male pattern baldness. The man had a bulky combat pistol holstered to his belt; attached to a shoulder sling, he held a semiautomatic rifle, an M16A2 with a plastic buttstock. Belknap noticed that he had activated the burst-control device: three rounds per trigger pull. At close quarters, three rounds would be plenty.

Belknap gave the man a brusque nod, taking care to meet his eyes forthrightly without inviting conversation, which could be disastrous. On impulse, he took out a radio communicator in hardened plastic, which resembled the standard military model, and started speaking into dead air.

“Did a quick walk-through of six, no sign of our guy,” Belknap said, his voice bored but professional. He noted the other man’s unit number, then spoke into the handset again. “Are we coordinated with the 171-Bs? I feel like we’re slathering on too many units here. It’s a goddamn crush.”

Make of that what you will, Belknap thought as he made his way down the next flight of stairs. The last flight of stairs, the one that led to the ground stairs, was easily accessible behind a broad steel push-bar-equipped door.

A fire door, in fact. Unlocked. But armed. A rectangular red-and-white sign warned FIRE DOOR. KEEP CLOSED. DO NOT BLOCK. A second sign further warned: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.

Dammit! Frustration hammered his chest from within. He turned back and made his way to the adjoining public hallway. As he strode down the hall, he counted three and perhaps four plain-clothed operatives. None gave him a second look; he was seen but not noticed; the camouflage uniform indeed conferred a kind of camouflage, albeit that of a spurious familiarity rather than invisibility.

A handful of people were stepping into one of the elevators, on their way to the ground floor. It was an opportunity: Again, acting on impulse, Belknap stepped into it seconds before the door closed.

A young woman standing next to him was talking quietly to another young woman: “And so I go, ‘If that’s how you feel, like, why are we having this conversation?’”

“You didn’t!” her friend replied.

An older man talked to a younger associate, both of them lawyers by all appearances, about some line item that needed to be “stopped before reconciliation.”

Belknap felt the gaze of some of the civilians on him. He also sensed that at least one person in the elevator was no civilian at all. He was a large man with arms that dangled away from his sides, suggesting the bulked-up musculature of a bodybuilder. He had short red hair and an almost matching reddish complexion, so that from a distance he had appeared bald. It seemed that he seldom wore the shirt he had on: The collar did not fit his thick neck, and despite the tie, he had to keep it unbuttoned at the top. The man—a fellow operative, it seemed clear—stared steadily, stonily, ahead of him. His jaws moved in a slow rhythm; he was chewing gum. Belknap saw the man’s face blurrily reflected on the stainless steel of the elevator door. Belknap was behind him. He did not look up; he knew that the elevators were connected to the building’s video surveillance system, that each had a wide-angle lens embedded in the center of its ceiling. It was important not to turn his face toward it.

In his mind he scrolled back to the lobby, trying to visualize its geometry. How far was the main entrance from the elevator? Thirty paces, give or take. He might just make it.

Belknap’s attention flitted among the few quiet conversations taking place as he counted the remaining seconds and willed himself to feel calm. An electronic bing. A small LED by the floor indicator changed from the red that signaled descent to the green that signaled ascent.

The doors rolled back, and everyone stepped onto the polished slate of the Hart Building lobby. The ride had taken perhaps fifteen seconds; he had known days that went faster.

Belknap held back for a lingering moment. It would be better not to have the muscled operative’s gaze settle on him again. All it would take was a passing thought, a moment of doubt—the hair, the shoes, the subtle irregularities of the uniform, his very presence on this elevator—and the game would be over. But the red-haired man was taking up a position by a phone booth across the hall; there was no alternative but to push past him.

Belknap continued walking, his heavy-soled boots quietly thunking against the polished floor, looking straight ahead, as if he meant to cross to the opposite wing of the building. All those leaving the building would be scrutinized. He would not betray his intentions until the very last moment.

He took fifteen paces. Eighteen paces. He had walked past another layer of plainclothesmen, shielded by the effrontery of his uniform, when a man in a brown suit suddenly gave a shout.

“That’s him!”

He pointed at Belknap, his eyes narrowed with certainty.

“Where?” Belknap heard another man call out.

“Which one?” a guardsman shouted, cradling his rifle in his arms.

Belknap joined the chorus: “Where?” he called out, craning his head behind him, as if the suited man had pointed not at him but at someone further away.

“Where?” Belknap repeated.

It was an uncomplicated, unsubtle ruse that would buy him only seconds. But if seconds were all he could get, seconds were what he would take. The lobby guard’s station was only a few yards away. Agency arrogance made it almost certain that the guard would not have been informed of the operation. Belknap could exploit that. Now he approached the man with the squashed features and heavy-lidded eyes, still seated by his clipboard, his lists, and the small video-display panels.

“We’ve got an emergency situation,” Belknap said. He whirled around and pointed out the brown-suited man. “How did that man get in here?” he demanded.

Now Belknap turned to face the suited operative. “What is your problem, man?” he protested.

“Hands where I can see them,” the man said. He gestured toward another man, someone behind Belknap. When Belknap craned around, he saw the red-haired man from the elevator. He was closing in, race-walking with a fast stride. By now, three uniformed guardsmen had their rifles out, though their faces betrayed confusion. It was all taking place so fast, and with so much misdirection, that they were less than confident about their target. To raise his hands would straighten that out in an instant; Belknap decided against doing so.

He replayed the geometry. Two operatives. Three guardsmen. One uniformed, unarmed lobby guard. A dozen other people, mainly visitors, most of whom had come to realize that there was a disturbance under way, though the state of their knowledge did not go much beyond that.

It was a lie, of course. Belknap was not in charge. As a result, it bewildered without menacing. Observers—including the three guardsmen—would not see a fugitive taken into custody. They would see a uniformed man claiming to be the brown-suited operative’s superior. The very illogic of the tableau would impede their ability to respond confidently to a rapidly changing situation—and that was precisely what Belknap required.

Now Belknap took another step closer to the man in the brown suit, looking into his eyes, ignoring the gun. He heard the footfalls of the muscled operative, who was closing the distance between them in the fastest way, walking straight toward him. A mistake, Belknap thought. It meant that all three men were aligned, and, more to the point, it meant that the operative’s .357 pistol—doubtless already drawn—was useless, at least for the moment. The caliber only ensured that a shot aimed at Belknap would travel on and hit the operative in the brown suit. For a few seconds, at least, Belknap knew he had nothing to fear from the red-haired man. Now Belknap took another step toward the man in the brown suit, who, just as Belknap anticipated, stood his ground: The gunman did not dare appear weak by retreating. He was perhaps two feet away from him now, maybe even a little less.

“I said, What is your problem?” Belknap repeated the meaningless taunt as he tilted his upper body back, his hips slightly forward, a pantomime of haughty indignation. The other man’s combat pistol—a full-sized Beretta Cougar—now pressed against Belknap’s taut stomach. It had an eight-round magazine, Belknap knew, because it stuck out half an inch from the bottom of the grip. The suited man could shoot him at any time. But Belknap had given him no cause—and the nine-millimeter round, aimed at center mass, would probably hit his red-haired comrade.

“Oh, no you don’t!” roared the red-haired man as the suited man sagged to the floor. Belknap heard the snick-click of a round being chambered.

The next three or four seconds would be as crucial as those preceding them. Belknap saw a clear fluid glistening on the fallen man’s upper lip and realized that it was cerebrospinal fluid. Nobody would assume that Belknap was harmless from this point; it was no longer a weapon to seem weaponless. He dropped forward, sprawling across the man at his feet, as if felled by an invisible blow, and grabbed at the Beretta that hung limply from the man’s fingers. As he rolled over, he released the 8045 Cougar magazine from the grip and hid it in his pocket. When he looked up at the red-haired bodybuilder, it was with a Beretta in his hand.

An impasse: two men with drawn handguns. Belknap rose smoothly to his feet. “A Mexican standoff,” he said.

A terrified hush had come over the civilians in the lobby; the last six seconds had made it clear that this was no longer a mere disturbance. Men and women began to cower, or freeze in place, obedient to some obscure animal instinct.

“Do the math and think again,” the snarling operative said.

Twelve seconds, thirteen seconds, fourteen seconds.

Belknap glanced at one of the guardsmen who was in his line of vision. “Arrest this man!” he yelled. The operatives were on hand to identify the target; the guardsmen were expected to apprehend. But whom? So long as they were not completely certain, their automatic weapons were useless.

The red-haired man blinked. He leveled the Cougar at Belknap with an unsettled look. Belknap had given him his gun, then grabbed his own: It made no sense. The man was smart enough to worry.

Belknap spoke to him in a low, confiding voice. “Listen to me very carefully. Follow my instructions precisely and you won’t get hurt.”

“You need glasses?” the operative demanded, waving his gun hand. “You got a death wish, asshole?”

“That Cougar feel a little light?” Belknap flashed a quick smile.

The operative’s florid countenance paled a little.

“You’re crazy,” the operative snarled. Yet, tellingly, he did not raise his voice.

“My advice? If this Glock contains full-jacketed roundpoints, take the hit. You’ll get a nice pension, and with any luck it won’t hit the spinal column or any of the major nerve branches. But if you’ve loaded the pistol with expanding slugs, the kind with high stopping power?” Belknap knew that the man had. “Then you’re going to spend the rest of your life asking yourself why you didn’t do the sensible thing. Decide now. Or I decide for you.”

The red-haired operative inhaled deeply, shakily. “I’ve got him!” he bellowed to the guardsmen. “The prisoner’s in my custody. Make way!” Another deep breath. From any distance, the fear and nausea on the man’s face would read as impatience. “Goddammit, I said make way!”

Belknap’s role, in turn, required him to look surrendered and dispirited. It came surprisingly easily.

The gantlet in front of the building was a blur of shouted commands. Belknap kept his eyes mainly downcast, occasionally glancing around to see the rope strung from sawhorses, the tight-faced guardsmen with rifles raised and aimed at him.

The red-haired man performed his part well, because all he had to do was to be the professional that he was. The fact that it was over in such a short period of time was what Belknap mainly had going for him. Less than sixty seconds in all. By the time the red-haired operative—Diller was the name someone had called him—had marched him down to the car, the hard part was over.

The man who had stepped onto the Metro looked like a member of the National Guard, a common sight in mass-transit venues. The man who stepped into the next car was wearing a green T-shirt and nylon track pants, like a jogger—an even commoner sight.

As the train hurtled down its subterranean tracks, Belknap felt the folded sheet of paper he’d secreted in his right pocket.

Genesis. You can run, he thought. Let’s see if you can hide.