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would say something at a Council meeting he wouldn’t want to see in the
Washington Post
. Sam felt like a fool. One of Newton’s competitors or enemies—and while there was a difference between the two, it could sometimes be hard to tell them apart—had evidently decided there was some advantage in outing the exchange between Sam and the powerful chairman of American Century. Anonymously, of course. Kamen could always be relied upon for discretion, which was clearly more than could be said of the CFR membership. Newton was the target. Sam was collateral damage. He was too small a fish for Al Kamen’s readership to care about. Everyone read Kamen. There was no way that Sam wasn’t going to hear about this at the office.
    Argus headquarters occupied almost half a block of high-end real estate three blocks south of the metro. On one side of the building there was a Gold’s Gym. On the other was a strip mall with a veritable United Nations of small businesses, including a Vietnamese noodle restaurant, a Korean dry cleaner, a halal butcher, and a Peruvian rotisserie chicken joint. Arlington, like much of fast-growing northern Virginia, was an eclectic mix of middle-class feds, old Southern families, and new immigrants. One of the best things about immigrants, Sam believed, was the restaurants they brought with them. He was a regular at the Vietnamese place where the former sergeant in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who ran it referred to him unironically as “Uncle Sam.” The wall behind the Formica bar in the restaurant was decorated with a mix of U.S. and South Vietnamese flags and laminated
National Geographic
maps of Vietnam that predated the fall of Saigon. Ethnic food was the second way Americans learned about global geography. The first, of course, was war.
    The Argus building itself was unprepossessing, a utilitarian concrete-and-glass structure that looked like so many other similar structures spreading out from the city center. Their growth was uneven, not in concentric rings like a tree but in long tendrils interwoven with major roads that blossomed around the metro stations. The strings of office parks were like some kind of aggressive vine growing up a garden lattice and watered by the seemingly endless stream of money that had been flowing without a break since that sad September morning now more than ten years in the past.
    A small sign at the front gate announced in sensible navy blue lettering that the building was home to ARGUS SYSTEMS . The “ A ” in ARGUS was an almost perfect equilateral triangle and the top half was a stylized Eye of Providence similar to the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill. Those like Sam who knew what to look for could see the telltale hallmarks of a building where people processed classified information. A high fence surrounded the facility. The elegant finials looked decorative but were, in fact, designed to make the fence harder to scale. Two thick wires running along the top could, Sam suspected, be electrified. He had never wanted to ask. There were numerous cameras visible and no doubt others that were not. The windows were narrow and tall and, most important, dark. There was nothing special looking about the facility, but to the experienced eye, it was far from ordinary. And far from cheap.
    The guard at the gate waved Sam through with only a cursory look at his ID. Inside, Argus Systems was all about function over style. If upper management was trying to send a message to the employees through its choice of decor, it was that the company considered itself a workhorse rather than a show horse. The South Asia Unit was on the third floor. The entire floor was a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility where cleared personnel could read, create, and talk about the most highly classified and tightly controlled information in the American intelligence system. The elevator opened onto a small atrium with a locked door and