You said I’ll oversee the execution of it personally, and you said by the book. I have been doing this for thirty years and I am telling you that those two sentences cannot both be true, and a very expensive lawyer has just noticed.”

I sat in that office and did something I had not done since a gravel shoulder on the I-495.

I thought about the doors of the Pentagon Annex conference room hitting the wall like a gunshot. The sound of my own oxfords on the floor. The silver eagles.

The four MPs in step behind me. The white gloves coming off. The way Daniel’s pen slipped out of his hand.

I had replayed that moment for seven years, and I had always replayed it as the moment I won.

“How bad,” I said.