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wanted to—but not as a combat soldier. He’d be more valuable doing what he did best. Her father was willing to call his fraternity brother, the junior senator from Ohio. The senator would call the Pentagon and put in a word.
    â€œI told you, Cindy,” Danny said, “the answer is no.”
    She attacked him, fists flying, tears falling. “You son of a bitch, wanting to die for nothing!”
    â€œFor nothing? My country is nothing?”
    â€œDanny, for God’s sake don’t leave me!”
    â€œI have to.”
    â€œLike hell you do. Daddy will make that call whether you like it or not!”
    Danny said, “Cindy, don’t even think of it. I mean it.”
    Cindy said, “Oh Jesus, sweetheart! You’re crazy.”
    Against her every instinct, because she was desperate, Cindy called Jack and asked him to come home and help her talk some sense into Danny.
    â€œI have this terrible feeling, Jack,” she said. “Something’s going to happen to him over there. I know it.”
    â€œI’ll be there Saturday,” Jack replied.
    â€œThat’s Danny’s last day.”
    â€œIt’s the best I can do. I have to work.”
    Thanks to Arthur, who knew a trendy Leftist on the staff of one of New York’s U.S. senators, Jack had a summer intern’s job in the senator’s Manhattan office. It paid no salary, but the contacts were good, and Jack was, you may be sure, making the most of them.
    Cindy said, “What time can you get here?”
    â€œI don’t know. I’m broke. I’ll have to hitchhike.”
    â€œFor God’s sake, Jack! I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”
    â€œHow? You’re there. I’m here.”
    â€œOver the phone, with a credit card. You can pick up the ticket at the airport.”
    â€œWow,” said Jack. “A credit card? Amazing.”
    Was he really so naïve? With Jack you never knew. But as Cindy said, remembering this conversation later in life, nobody in Jack’s family had ever had a credit card, or even a checking account. He was not only the first Adams to go to college, but also the first to ride on an airplane.
    â€œAnd now look at him,” she said. “No wonder Danny wanted to fight for America.”
    * Note on Methodology. This woman was interviewed early in Jack Adams’s public life by an operative of ours posing as a tabloid journalist. He paid her a modest sum for her reminiscence, but her chief reward was the opportunity to betray secrets. An intelligence report, the literary form with which I am most familiar, is seldom an eyewitness account, but rather a synthesis of one or many such accounts. So also in this narrative: I am not omniscient, but if I was not there, what I write is based on the firsthand reports of reliable witnesses who met the characters and heard the words they spoke with their own ears. It is not my plan, in this memoir, to keep anything I know from you. Of course, I didn’t know everything, and it must be remembered that Jack lied to everyone about everything, and that some of our informants undoubtedly lied about Jack’s lies. In any case, I report what I know and all that I know and, like a good intelligence officer, do not guess at what I do not know. You are under no such restriction.

2 In those days Danny was the famous one. Everyone in Tannery Falls knew that Danny was leaving for the war, and they gave him no peace. He had come home a hero so many times that the people who had cheered him from the grandstand took it for granted that he would do so again.
    On Danny’s last night in town the three of them fled across the border of his celebrity to a roadhouse in a town twenty miles away. The roadhouse was small and dark. The four-piece band, dressed in powder-blue polka-dot dinner jackets, was led by a blind pianist who sang bouncy dance tunes of the 1940s in a foggy tenor.
    â€œHey, wow, merry-go-round music,”