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    The first time the CIA tried to book me on a flight, a few months after I joined, they ran headlong into the weirdness of my talent. The airlines all used computers to track reservations, so any details about my ticket would vanish.
    So they tried booking me under an alias, figuring that the computers wouldn’t know it was me. Those reservations disappeared as quickly as the first.
    “It’s no use,” I told Edward as he hung up the phone after talking to the travel office. “There’s no way I can fly anywhere, which means I won’t be able to carry out any missions.”
    “Nonsense, my boy,” he said. “Someone with your talents was born for a job like this. We just need to figure out the limitations on what is affected and work around those.”
    After some trial and error experimentation, we found a way: use an existing reservation made for someone else and informing that person his trip had been postponed. It meant creating new identity documents for me for every trip, but that was no obstacle for the CIA.
    My assignments started off small, making dead drop deliveries. Then I was assigned to tail people they were interested in and report on their movements. Eventually the operations grew bigger and bolder. After only three years, I was back to stealing things for a living.
    But now I was stealing them for the government.

Chapter Four
    After seven years as a CIA officer, I had found my own ways of doing things. That’s why, two weeks after delivering cockroaches in London, I was delivering pizzas in Barcelona just before one in the morning—that, plus the fact that if there was one thing the CIA hated more than not being able to break other people’s codes, it was other people being able to break ours.
    The headquarters of InterQuan loomed ahead of me, silhouetted against the clouds reflecting the nighttime lights of the city. InterQuan was Spain’s leading competitor in the race to develop practical quantum computers, and according to a CIA source the company’s engineers had just finished a prototype chip capable of—among other nifty things—breaking the encryption used for the secure lines to U.S. embassies worldwide.
    My orders were to steal that prototype. I’d decided on a nighttime approach because cracking a safe during the building’s working hours was more conspicuous.
    Beyond the building’s glass doors, the security guard sat at his desk in the lobby. Since I was carrying four pizza boxes, I hit the intercom button with my elbow and said, “Pizza.” My Spanish might be lousy, but pizza was pizza.
    I was working on the assumption that InterQuan, like many tech companies, fueled its operations with junk food and caffeine. If for some reason InterQuan was staffed entirely with health-food nuts, I would have to try a different approach.
    The door lock buzzed, so I pushed my way into the lobby. I marched over to the guard’s desk, where I deposited the pizzas. The warm scent of melted cheese escaped from the top box. “Sesenta y dos euros,” I said.
    The guard said something to me in rapid-fire Spanish.
    With a shrug, I said, “No hablo bien. Americano.”
    “Who order pizzas?” asked the guard. His English was slightly better than my Spanish.
    “I don’t know. They just give me an address, I deliver the pizzas, and I collect the money.” I held out my palm and tapped it for emphasis.
    The guard—Carlos, according to his name tag—scratched the back of his neck. “I not order, I not pay.”
    “Call upstairs,” I said, holding my thumb and pinkie out next to my head in the internationally recognized hand sign for making a phone call. Then, pretending to remember something, I added, “Seventh floor. Piso siete. ”
    According to the CIA’s source, that’s where the prototype was. From outside the building, I hadn’t seen any lights on that floor, and the parking lot was mostly deserted, but someone might still be working late up there.
    Carlos got on his walkie-talkie and spoke