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Could the sins of an adopted Central American child who grows up to be a treasonous spy really be blamed on the loving couple who took her in and gave her a chance at a good life?
    Kera had done her best to ignore all of that. What did it matter anyway? The media had been spun and misled so thoroughly that they had no hope of getting the story right. She was just thankful that her parents had been spared the dirty misinformation campaign intended to level suspicion and judgment on her.
    She had to look away when she saw the wet shine in his eyes. That’s when she knew she had to go. She pulled a folded slip of paper from her pocket. “Here. If you need to reach me, use this e-mail address. But don’t use your computer at home. They’re watching that.”
    “Who’s watching that?”
    “I’m sorry, Dad. Good-bye for now.”
    “Who’s watching us?” he called after her. “Kera, what have you done?”

L ANGLEY
    She looked different from her online pictures. Not worse, like the others had; but still, the disconnect had thrown him. Live and in three dimensions, she looked like a distant, older cousin of the woman Bright’s imagination had constructed from her dating-profile photos. Now that Bright had spent a few hours in her company, he could see, retroactively, the honest resemblances contained in those photographs. The lines at the corners of her mouth when she smiled. The look in her eyes when she laughed, which was so tied to the sound and movement of her laugh that its identifying contours could not possibly be conveyed in a picture viewed by a stranger.
    In the span of their first meal, the dating-profile version of herself had been replaced with the live woman in front of him, and to his surprise, Bright found his curiosity deepening in her presence. She commanded a down-to-earth appeal that he rounded up to beauty. And her eyes cast the hint of a wild drive he couldn’t imagine she had a use for in her career as an airline-industry lobbyist. She was the kind of woman Bright could picture equally comfortable watching an opera or drinking pints in a sports bar. On their first date the y’d barely glossed over the topic of their jobs. When she asked, he had told her only that he worked at a foreign-policy think tank, his usual cover story.
    After he got out of this meeting, Bright decided, he would call her—Audrey—and suggest they have dinner again later in the week.
    A mention of the late Ambassador Rodgers by a woman down the conference table nudged Bright back into the present. But the name had only been dropped in the service of making some tangential point, and the woman continued on about chatter the Central America division had intercepted and interpreted as a terror group’s ambition to strike the Panama Canal. Bright listened, hoping he wouldn’t be called upon to acknowledge that he knew nothing more about the ambassador’s death. The meeting he was in was a daily high-level teleconference session between CIA Director Cal Tennison and the director of national intelligence, who delivered the daily security briefing each morning to the president. Bright rarely attended such sessions, but h e’d been asked to sit in today in case the DNI brought up the situation in China, which so far he hadn’t.
    Bright’s mind had begun to wander again when the door to the room opened slightly, and his assistant, looking rather sheepish in this company, slipped in.
    There was a short list of people for whom Lionel Bright was to be pulled out of any meeting, should they call. James Pollert was not on that list, but that was only because it had never occurred to Bright that the US secretary of state would have any reason to call him. Fortunately, Bright’s administrative assistant had taken the liberty of exercising his common sense and, instead of asking the secretary of state if he wanted to leave a message, broke into the DNI briefing to deliver a Post-it tucked inside a file folder.
    Bright did a slight