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entirely possible to spend time on the Range and never notice the low-slung concrete-and-glass building that serves as combination administrative headquarters, training and conference facility, and barracks. This building is situated a hundred yards or so from a helipad clearing that, owing to peculiarities of elevation and vegetation, is nearly impossible to find.
    Harry Dunne had said little during the trip there. In fact, the only opportunity for chat had been the brief limousine ride to the campus helipad; during the helicopter trip to Virginia, both men, accompanied by Dunne’s silent aide-decamp, wore protective noise-insulating headphones. Debarking from the dark green government helicopter, the three men were met by an anonymous-looking assistant.
    Bryson and Dunne, the assistants in tow, passed through the facility’s unremarkable-looking main lobby and descended a set of stairs into a subterranean, spartan, low-ceilinged chamber. On the smooth, white-painted walls were mounted, like blank rectangular canvases, a pair of large, flat, gas-plasma display monitors. The two men took their seats at a gleaming table of brushed steel. One of the silent assistants disappeared; the other took a seat at a station just outside the closed door to the chamber.
    As soon as Dunne and Bryson were seated, Dunne began to speak without ceremony or preface. “Let me tell you what I believe you believe,” he began. “You believe you’re a fucking unsung hero. This is in fact the central unshakable conviction that has enabled you to endure a decade and a half of tension so brutal, any lesser man would have cracked long ago. You believe you spent fifteen years in the service of your country, working for an ultraclandestine agency known as the Directorate. Virtually nobody else, even at the highest levels of the U.S. government, knows of its existence, with the possible exception of the chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a couple of key players in the White House who’ve been cleared up the wazoo. A closed loop—or rather, as close as you can come to a closed loop in this fallen world.”
    Bryson took measured breaths, determined not to betray his emotions by any visible display of shock. Yet he was shocked: the CIA man knew of matters that had been cloaked with extraordinary thoroughness.
    â€œTen years ago, you even received a Presidential Medal of Honor for services rendered above and beyond,” Dunne went on. “But, your operations being so hush-hush, there was no ceremony, no president, and I bet you didn’t even get to keep the medal.” Bryson flashed back to the moment: Waller opening the box and showing him the heavy brass object. Of course, it would have put operational secrecy unacceptably at risk if Bryson had been invited to the White House for the presentation; still, he’d swelled with pride all the same. Waller had asked him if it bothered him—the fact that he’d achieved the highest civilian honor in America and nobody would ever know. And Bryson, moved, told him honestly no—Waller knew, the president knew; his work had made the world just a little safer, and that was enough. He’d meant it, too. That, in a nutshell, was the ethos of the Directorate.
    Now Dunne pressed a sequence of buttons on a control panel embedded in the steel-topped table, and the twin flat screens shimmered into vibrant display. There was a photograph of Bryson as an undergraduate at Stanford—not an official portrait, but a candid, taken without his knowledge. Another of him in a mountain region of Peru, clad in fatigues; this dissolved into an image of him with dyed skin and grizzled beard, impersonating one Jamil Al-Moualem, a Syrian munitions expert.
    Astonishment is an emotion impossible to sustain for any length of time: Bryson felt his shock gradually ebbing into sharp annoyance, then anger. Obviously he’d been caught in the