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he had a couple of weeks to kill, and Tom Cantwell, the head of Diplomatic Security, had given him several ongoing files to work with. Busy-work, really, reviewing findings of existing investigations and raising questions and holes. He didn’t mind. Bear Wyden liked to stay busy.
    For now, though, it was time to go home.
    Bear had rented a studio apartment not far from DuPont Circle and walking distance from the office. He didn’t have many needs these days. Leah left with their two dogs and three kids and everything he’d owned two years before. He couldn’t blame her. They’d often worked together, and as colleagues, they were good to go. Not so much as husband and wife. So now he had his apartment and his books, a laptop computer, and way too much time on his hands, and she had a new husband, a new house, and had cut back her hours.
    He locked his temporary desk, and put on his jacket, preparing to leave the office. There were no personal touches—no point, considering he’d be leaving soon anyway.
    The phone rang, and for five seconds he considered ignoring it.
    It was Cantwell.
    “Bear Wyden,” he answered.
    “Cantwell. Can you come up for a few minutes, Wyden? We’ve got a hot one.”
    Bear raised his eyebrows. Cantwell was normally dull, tired, uninterested. He described potential crises as “synergistic opportunities,” not as “hot ones.”   Something was definitely odd here.
    “I’ll be right there.”
    Five minutes later he’d ridden the temperamental old elevators up to the seventh floor, the inner sanctum. Secretary Kerry had his office here, as had predecessors throughout his career: Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice. It might be a little old fashioned and hokey, but Bear was a believer. He was a believer in democracy. He was a believer in his country. And sometimes he was a little bit in awe of the stature of the place he worked, when he wasn’t overwhelmed by the bullshit. Whenever his work took him to the seventh floor at Main State—not very often—he felt that sense of awe.
    Cantwell did not awe him. A political functionary, appointed to the job after the shakeup following the Benghazi attack, Cantwell did little to offend and little to inspire. He occupied his desk, let the department work underneath him, and periodically testified on Capitol Hill.
    Bear supposed there could be worse people sitting in this chair.
    “Bear. Good, I’m glad you were still in the building. I need to brief you in on a case, and it’s one with potentially serious implications.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “All right. Do you happen to know Ambassador Richard Thompson?”
    “The new Sec Def? Of course. I ran the security detail for the Embassy in Brussels when he was there. We had to provide protection for the entire family, along with some of the other high profile people, if I remember correctly.”
    “What’s your impression?”
    Bear tilted his head. His impression had always been that Richard Thompson was a cold fish, and a dangerous one, and that his wife… what was her name? Something Spanish, he thought. She was way too young for Thompson, way too passionate. It was a bad match, he thought. But Diplomatic Security agents weren’t paid to have personal opinions about their charges.
    “I can’t really give one, sir. That was more than twenty years ago. I knew the Ambassador and his wife, and I arranged for their security detail.”
    “Anything unusual?”
    Bear shrugged his shoulders. “Not really. There were some specific threats against his family, if I remember correctly. They had two… no, three little girls. I think the oldest was ten or so at the time.”
    “What sort of threats against the family?”
    Bear shrugged. “The usual. It was all stuff out of the Middle East… remember this was about a year after the Gulf War. What’s all this about?”
    Cantwell sat back in his seat. “Ambassador Thompson ended up having six daughters. The youngest was