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porch. “Maybe I should have stayed on at Langley for a few more years, kept plugging away.” In the years prior to his retirement, Nick had been removed from a SALT II delegation, brought home from a Geneva arms control committee, and then eased into bureaucratic limbo after he’d been accused of underestimating Soviet capabilities in the annual CIA assessment. “Do you ever think about it, whether you did the right thing or not, quitting the Intelligence Committee when you did?”
    â€œNot much anymore.”
    â€œIt worries me. What you said about this administration is true. It’s not a joke anymore.”
    â€œNo, it’s not a joke.”
    â€œBut even if I were back there, back at Langley, what could I do? After a time, people stop listening; you become too predictable. That’s what happened to me. I’d used up my capital.”
    â€œMost of us did. The rooster that crowed himself to death. Maybe that was me too. No, I think you did the right thing.”
    â€œYou think so?”
    They’d talked of it many times, but Nick Straus’s doubts remained, the question always returning. Something had gone out of him, Wilson thought, some purpose denied, something broken or missing, like the old grandfather clock in the downstairs hall that would fall silent for days at a time and then suddenly begin ticking again, waking him with its ghostly chimes as it tolled the hour at five o’clock in the morning.
    â€œThat’s always the trap,” Wilson said, “waiting a few more years. You wait a few more years and then it’s too late, there’s nothing left. You don’t want to go anywhere or do anything, just remember where you’ve been and how it used to be—Korea, NATO in the old days, all the old myths that don’t exist anymore. No, you did the right thing. The problem now is to pick up from here and go on. Maybe we should open a consulting firm. That’s something we could think about—Straus and Wilson, the beltway bandits.”
    â€œMaybe. It sounds like a shoe store.” Nick climbed out. “Thanks for the lift. Stop by sometime.”
    Wilson cranked down the window. “I’m going out to Ed Donlon’s place in the Shenandoah this weekend,” he called, “maybe cut some firewood, work the dogs. Why don’t you come along?”
    But Nick Straus only waved as he passed in front of the coach lamp and Wilson couldn’t hear his reply. He wondered what Nick had wanted him to say, what he might have told him—someone whose grasp of the issues of the times made Wilson’s own amateur ramblings sound like so much warm air from some bush-town hot-stove league.
    He drove back through the rain to his own residence a mile away, a sprawling, white-painted brick rambler on a winding lane between McLean and North Arlington. A small creek lay in front of the sloping acre lot planted in oak, maple, and dogwood. He’d bought the house fifteen years ago at a time he could barely afford it. Now it was appraised at quadruple its original cost and he couldn’t afford to sell it. With their two sons out of college and living elsewhere—the oldest in residency at a Boston hospital, the youngest in Oregon—Betsy was already thinking about moving to Naples, Florida. She wanted to buy a house on the Gulf near her parents and sister.
    At forty-eight, Haven Wilson wasn’t enthusiastic. Washington was his city, even if under enemy occupation, and rural Virginia was his country, autumn and winter country, the hillsides blooming with dogwood and red-bud in the spring, with yellow and red maples in October, as in the small town in southwestern Virginia where he’d grown up. He didn’t like Florida’s unchanging season any more than he liked the Miami Dolphins. People who sat in hot weather stadiums should be watching jai alai or the dog races, not football, which belonged to autumn and winter,