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start-up and an apartment in a modest building only a short distance from the Dharavi slums. Her real labor of love, however, was the school she ran in Dharavi, teaching science, math, and engineering to Dalit and other lower-caste children. They spoke at least once a week, and Sam was already planning his first private-sector junket to the region that would include a stop in Mumbai.
    â€œWhat’s new on your end?” he asked, after catching her up on the latest family gossip and the early reports on the Nationals’ spring training.
    â€œI’m struggling a bit here, Dad, with the city bureaucracy. There’s a developer who wants to bulldoze Mom’s old neighborhood and turn it into a gated community for the uberrich. Uncle Ramananda and I are trying to stop it, but the developer has some powerful allies and I don’t know if we’re going to succeed.”
    Jarapundi Ramananda was the unofficial mayor of Dharavi, a con artist, an organized-crime figure of some repute, and a close friend of Sam’s from his days at the consulate in Mumbai. He was also Lena’s godfather. Sam liked Ramananda tremendously, but he did not necessarily trust him. He hoped Lena was mature enough to understand the difference.
    â€œI have confidence in you, honey. But be careful with your uncle. I’m sure he has his own agenda.”
    â€œHe always does. But I think there’s considerable overlap between his and mine at this point.”
    â€œAll right. Keep me posted. Let me know if there’s some way you think I can help.”
    â€œI love you, Daddy.”
    â€œI love you too, sweetheart. Happy birthday.”
    After they hung up, Sam sat in the dark car for a minute or so, thinking about how much he missed his daughter. He was proud of her and the woman she was becoming. Lena was the one thing in his life, he thought, that he had gotten absolutely right.
    As luck would have it, the Mathias General Store catered to the D.C. tourist trade as well as to local tastes. He found a perfectly acceptable California cabernet nestled between a case of Miller High Life and an enormous stack of Ring Dings. When he got back to the cabin, Vanalika was still in bed.
    She was true to her word.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
    MARCH 31

    T hose commuters who rode the Orange Line into the District from the distant suburbs of northern Virginia referred to the experience as the Orange Crush. The metro had been designed for a more genteel time and a ridership less than half the size of the crowd who piled on at stops from Vienna to Rosslyn. Federal drones on the Orange Crush, dressed in drab trench coats with plastic ID cards hanging around their necks on cheap metal lanyards, were packed in cheek-by-jowl in a morning rush hour that seemed to expand in both directions by a few minutes every year. The rush now lasted from about six-thirty until well after nine. There was no escaping it. It was an unpleasant way to start the workday, which is why a basement-level parking pass was the ultimate status symbol in nearly every federal agency.
    The reverse commute from downtown to the inner suburbs was not nearly as bad. Sam’s ride in from Capitol Hill to Argus Systems headquarters in Arlington was an easy twenty-minute trip. On most mornings, he got a seat and the chance to finish the
Washington Post
on the way in to work. Usually, he read the heavy news over breakfast and the train ride out to Ballston was for the sports page and the comics. This Monday morning, however, Sam was rereading every Washington insider’s favorite gossip column, Al Kamen’s “In the Loop.” There was a three-paragraph report in the column about Sam’s embarrassing Richard Newton at the CFR event on Friday.
    Talking to a reporter about who said what in a closed CFR meeting was an egregious violation of the Council’s rules, but there were few real secrets in the nation’s capital. Not for long, in any event. Only a fool