That a clerk had been paid to put it there.

And here is the part I had made my peace with long before that morning, the part I did not say aloud because it would have been cruelty rather than truth: the frame was clumsy.

It was not some criminal masterpiece that any reasonable man would have fallen for.

A hotel record and a paid rumor — that was all it was, and it would have come apart in an afternoon under the lightest honest scrutiny, one phone call to my command, one look at the training orders that had my name on them in a government database.

The frame worked not because it was good but because Rhett wanted it to work.