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we got here,” said one of the officers. He placed his cigarette on Mark’s plate and stood up. “Now we just wait for instructions. The movers are outside. You can gather the things you wish to take with you.”
    “You and your men didn’t do this?”
    “Of course not.”
    Mark wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.
    He walked slowly through his kitchen, stepping over the remnants of a takeout Chinese dinner from the week before. In a way, he thought, it didn’t matter that his place was trashed. What would he have done with his stuff anyway? All it meant was that Orkhan would have less to store.
    One question that had been eating away at him—how an assassin had known to find him at the library—was answered by the wall calendar hanging in his kitchen. On today’s date, he’d written
8:30, Heydar, library reading room
. He’d bought the calendar after taking the job at Western University, to keep track of his classes. Stupid, he told himself. There were some habits he’d developed while working for the Agency—like an obsession with never keeping a set schedule, and certainly never posting his appointments where people could read them—that, evidently, he should have held on to.
    In his bedroom, his dresser drawers had been ripped all the way out, his clothes scattered around the floor, and his mattress slashed. More importantly, his laptop was gone.
    He looked around, then back at his desk again, then under it, and then in the closet.
    The book-length manuscript he’d been working on,
Soviet Intelligence Operations in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, 1918-1922
, had been saved on that computer. Nearly two years of intense research, two hundred thousand words of text. He was only a few months away from finishing it. It was going to be the book that established his academic credentials, his gateway to landing a university job in the States or Europe.
    He’d backed it up, though. In several places, just in case.
    He wasn’t an idiot; he’d be OK.
    Mark rifled through the jumble of papers and pens and scholarly books that were still on his desk. Where was the damn thumb drive? It was neon yellow, and he’d left it to the right of the computer, next to the coffee mug he’d been using as a penholder.
    But it wasn’t there now.
    “You motherfuckers,” he muttered.
    It’s probably somewhere on the floor, he told himself. Besides, he had a third backup, one that he’d made on a CD a couple of months ago. He’d lose a lot of work, but losing two months was better than losing two years. He’d stored the CD in his bedroom closet, in an old shoebox.
    The shoebox was upended on the floor of his closet. Scattered around it were old computer cords, spare rolls of Scotch tape, extra pens, envelopes, and Post-it notes—but no CD.
    Beginning to panic now, Mark dropped to the floor and searched through everything in the room. The security guards eventually took pity on him, asked what he was looking for, and joined in the hunt. Together they scoured every inch of the apartment.
    Eventually Mark’s minders said it was time to leave for the airport. Then the phone rang.

11
    Washington, DC

    T HE CONFERENCE ROOM on the ground floor of the West Wing had an unnatural smell to it, the result of the ozone from constantly running air filters.
    “This meeting is called to order,” said the president. “We’re here to discuss how to respond to recent intelligence reports coming out of Iran. I’ll cede the floor to Jim.”
    A bald former four-star admiral, currently the director of national intelligence, produced a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and began to pass them out. “The president’s daily brief. The president has already reviewed it and approved its distribution to the Security Council. It provides a summary of all that we know to date.”
    The room fell silent, except for the sound of papers rustling, as the vice president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the