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Handling channels in Headquarters. Not more than fifty people at Langley read incoming LYRIC cables.
    “As much as it pains me to admit it,” said Gable, “I want you to know I think you did a fucking great job when LYRIC walked in.”
    Nate shifted a little in his seat. Gable was not one to give out compliments.
    “I would have thrown the pukey old man out of the walk-in room. You followed your instincts, nailed your hunch, and we got a platinum case on the books. Good job.” At the door Forsyth smiled.
    “Now comes precision, now comes focus. I want you to run this agent as tight as a bar hostess in Vientiane,” said Gable.
    “I’m not sure I get—”
    “I’ll explain it to you when you graduate high school,” said Gable.
    “I’ll look forward to it,” said Nate.
    “That don’t mean you can skate,” said Gable, “especially at the start of this tour. You haven’t done squat on your own power since you got here. I’m watching you, Nash.”
    Forsyth chuckled. “Nate, I think Marty’s trying to tell you he likes you,” said Forsyth. He popped the latches on the ACR door.
    “Jesus wept,” said Nate. A moment of silence, and then the sound of Forsyth’s laughter boomed down the hallway.

    During their previous time in Helsinki, DCOS Gable had watched over young Nate, had kicked him in the ass, and had taught him valuable lessons: Always protect your agent, never trust the flatland cake eaters at Headquarters, make the hard operational decisions, and don’t worry about the fucking politics.
    Gable was fifty-something, a knuckly, leather-faced, crew-cut case officer who carried a Browning Hi Power in a Bianchi belt-loop holster, and had made his bones in every backwater capital in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He had recruited sweating, chittering equatorial ministers, passing a bottle of Ugandan scotch back and forth inside a sweltering Land Rover. He had debriefed a Burmese four-star while holding a roll of toilet paper and watching for blue-scaled pit vipers in the buffalo grass as the general squatted, stricken with dysentery. And Gable had carried his agent out of the Andean jungle in a tropical downpour—the first ever penetration of the Shining Path in Peru—after the case went bad.
    The three of them—the senior, placid Forsyth; the china-smashing Gable; and the resolute Nate—were each of a different grade and temperament, but in traditionally rank-neutral CIA they were a crew, bound by the rigors of past operations and the unacknowledged brotherhood of working together in their clandestine world. And now Nate had his assignment to Athens and they were back together. All except Dominika, who was unaccounted for, out of contact.
    In Helsinki, Gable had coached him while Nate recruited Dominika, a spectacular success for a junior CIA officer. But Gable also quickly sensed that Nate and his agent had been intimate. “Are you fucking nuts?” he had raved at Nate. “You’re jeopardizing her life, your agent’s life.” Nate had triedbackpedaling until Gable shut him up. “Don’t fucking deny it,” said Gable. “Your only job is to protect her, not because you love her, not because it’s regulations. You fucking do it because she agreed to produce intel for you and put her life in your hands to do it. And you sacrifice everything to make sure she stays alive. Nothing is more important.” Nate remembered the words even as he thought about Dominika, somewhere in Moscow.
    Then–Chief of Station Tom Forsyth, also around fifty, tall and slim, with salt-and-pepper hair perpetually tousled by reading glasses pushed up and on top of his head, had agreed with his deputy. But unlike the swift ass-kicking promised by Gable, Forsyth had called Nate into his wood-paneled Helsinki Station office and delivered an hour-long high mass of agent-handling rules so nuanced, so brilliantly clear, that Nate hadn’t moved in his chair. Preserving the intel flow was his duty, Forsyth had said; it’s why