“And when we land in Chicago, you stand behind me, and you keep your eyes on me, and you let what’s going to happen, happen.

You don’t run.

You don’t argue.

Whatever it looks like in that first minute, you trust that it’s the way out, not the trap closing.

Can you do that?” I needed him to say yes and mean it, because a half-committed man is more dangerous than a frightened one, and everything from here depended on my brother being able to sit across a breakfast table from the man who had trapped him and give nothing away.

It was an enormous thing to ask of someone already at the end of himself.