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The interior of the ex-CIA man’s small house was even grimmer than the exterior. It smelled like stale cigarettes and old beer and mold. Magazines and newspapers were stacked haphazardly everywhere, empty Coke and beer cans littered the floor and the tops of the piles, and ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts. Horgan had cleared off a chair for Paul by excavating a pile of newspapers and tossing them onto the floor. He insisted that Paul put his phone in a black sleeve that he said was a Faraday bag. It blocked all signals emanating to and from the device, he explained.

While Paul answered Horgan’s questions, the Dobermann sat contentedly at Horgan’s feet making a low rumble, a quiet growl, almost a purring sound. Meanwhile, Horgan chain-smoked Camel Straights.

Horgan got up and found in a steel file cabinet a printout that he said was from the CIA’s internal employee newsletter, What’s News . It was a photograph of a senior CIA official, identified as Geraldine Dempsey, receiving an award from the CIA director. A middle-aged woman with a thin mouth, a short, perky blonde Princess Diana haircut, and a navy suit with big padded shoulders.

“This is the woman at CIA whom I worked for. Geraldine Dempsey,” Horgan said.

“West Texas?” Paul remembered Dempsey from the FBI office in New York.

“Exactly. Very good. She runs an off-the-books unit known informally by its cryp, Phantom.”

“Cryp?”

“Cryptonym. Code name.” Horgan lit another Camel. “Phantom. Known on the inside as F-A-N. For the Russian translation, Fantom .”

“Wait, so . . . Phantom is the unit?”

Horgan exhaled a long plume of smoke. “You know the cryp. You must know something about this.”

“I’ve put some things together, yeah. You tell me.”

“An off-the-books operation.”

“That does what? Targets Russian oligarchs or something, like Galkin?”

Horgan shrugged. “Phantom did black ops within the U.S., I know that much. I hear it’s shut down.”

“Black ops? What does that mean, exactly?”

Horgan seemed to have a nervous habit of jiggling his right knee up and down, Paul noticed, and now he was doing it again. “Clandestine activities. Given the way these things are compartmented, I only knew a fragment.”

“But what kind of black ops?”

Horgan shrugged.

Paul decided to take a different tack: “And that woman, Geraldine Dempsey, fired you?”

“Right.”

“What for?”

“Attempting to leak classified information.”

“Did you?”

“I tried. God, did I try.”

“About Phantom.”

“You got it. Proof that CIA was using foreign talent to carry out black ops within the United States.”

“I didn’t see anything on the internet about a CIA leak.”

“That’s because nothing appeared. The Agency applied pressure, pulled strings. Both the Times and the Post spiked stories. As detrimental to our national security or some bullshit like that.”

“What did you try to get printed? The identity of a CIA agent?”

“I would never do that.” More knee spindling.

“Then what?”

“How the Phantom unit hired talent within the U.S. to do black ops. Wet work. Whatever you want to call it. It’s all illegal, according to U.S. law. It’s an outrage.”

“‘Talent’? For what?”

“You ever read about the killing of some FBI agents in New York?”

“I was there. Right afterward. I saw the bodies. I was told the Russians did it.”

“Oh, the guys who did the dirty work were Russians, all right. I know. But they were hired by Geraldine Dempsey. By the CIA.”

“What?”

“Light dawns on Marblehead,” Horgan said with a peculiar smile. “Hired by a unit of the CIA. The Phantom unit. Dempsey hired a crew of ex-GRU goons, so it would point to Moscow. An old CIA trick. False-flagging.”

“The CIA hired Russians to kill FBI agents in New York?”

Horgan just looked at him with an odd, knowing smile on his face, nearly a smirk.

“Hold on—so, it wasn’t Moscow that was behind the murder of those FBI agents, it was . . . us ? It was the goddamned CIA? The CIA killed FBI agents? That’s incredible.”

“To be precise, not CIA. The Phantom unit. A special unit within CIA kept secret even from the spooks.”

“That massacre was officially sanctioned?”

Horgan nodded.

“I never saw that anywhere—never heard it was CIA.”

“That’s because the story was buried. Or it never came out. One thing my old agency is good at is keeping secrets.”

“The CIA . . .” Paul said. “I thought they don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Not for years. And even when they did . . . You’re talking about killing FBI agents?”

Horgan laughed dryly. “Well . . . not till Geraldine Dempsey was named to head the Phantom unit.”

“How could she—I mean, the director of the CIA must have known, right?”

“The goddamned White House had to approve it! That high up.”

“This is a huge story.”

“And of course it’s totally illegal. Violates CIA’s charter, U.S. laws. Man, I was expecting a front-page exposé. But not a single publisher in the U.S. would touch it. They couldn’t face the legal pressure. You know, when I first heard about this, I spoke out in-house. I was a good boy. I went through channels, I lodged complaints with the inspector general, and . . . crickets. They just reassigned me. So in a moment of frustration and weakness, I called a Washington Post reporter. And then she had me fired.”

“Who did?”

“Geraldine!”

“Couldn’t you just self-publish?”

“Doesn’t work that way. It’s still breaking the goddamned law. And I don’t have deep pockets. They were going to sue the shit out of me, shut me down, and I couldn’t afford to fight them.”

“And yet . . . you’re alive.”

“That wet work, that’s the past. Not since Phantom was shut down. New leadership forbids any kind of lethal action like that anymore. They say the Russians may do it, but we don’t. Besides, there’s too many eyes on me.”

“I don’t—” Paul faltered a moment. “I don’t get how Dempsey hasn’t been arrested by FBI for what she’s done.”

“Because nothing’s on paper. They don’t have her dead to rights. They don’t have proof. If you can get that, you’ll get an FBI arrest pronto, no problem.”

“She must have good contacts at the FBI,” Paul suggested. “Don’t you think?”

“Look, whenever she finds herself in a dangerous situation, she’s always accompanied by SPS officers, and they—”

“SPS officers?”

“Sorry. That’s the CIA’s Security Protective Service. Draws from cops or FBI. The best of them are former FBI SWAT officers. So she knows how capable FBI agents can be. She uses them.”

The dog got up and trotted over to Paul, nudging his knee. Then he sat down on top of his feet. Paul was careful not to shift his feet and antagonize the creature.

“Don’t worry about Brutus. He’s actually a big old softie,” Horgan said. “A sweetie.”

“Yeah, so I’ve seen.” Paul said. “So it wasn’t Russian government intelligence operatives doing the killings in the U.S. It was Russians hired by the U.S. To make it look like Moscow was doing them.”

“Precisely.”

“But why? Why did the CIA do something so . . . evil?”

“To protect Phantom.”

“Phantom being . . . what?”

“Like I said, it’s the code name for an operation.”

“Which does what ? Black ops for what exactly?”

“For Christ’s sake, I don’t know.” Horgan’s knee spindled.

“So why is the FBI coming after me?”

Horgan shook his head. “What do they say you did wrong?”

A long pause. “They’re calling it theft of intelligence.”

“Did you?”

“Steal intelligence? No. I took a flash drive labeled ‘Phantom.’ From a Russian oligarch, Arkady Galkin.”

“And what’s on that flash drive?”

“It’s encrypted. So I don’t know. At first I thought it was Arkady Galkin’s kompromat on politicians or government officials he’d paid off. Like a Mafia ledger. But now I can only guess. Maybe it’s proof of a CIA black-ops unit. Maybe Galkin knows what’s going on at the CIA.”

Horgan lit another cigarette. “Look, way back in the day, when Harry Truman founded CIA, he was afraid he might be creating some kind of super Gestapo agency, so he laid down the law: no domestic spying. And then, twenty years later, in the Nixon administration, the Agency was caught spying on American citizens. Which resulted in a huge outcry, Senate hearings. CIA promised to stop.”

“Did it?”

Horgan smirked, shook his head, snorted. “A couple of years ago, it was revealed that CIA has been conducting what they call ‘bulk collection’ in America. Gaining access to millions of Americans’ private data, their emails and text messages and phone calls. So, no, it doesn’t stop, hasn’t stopped, won’t stop.”

Paul watched Horgan, nodded.

“You have no idea how rotten the CIA is, do you? Your whole generation, you don’t give a shit. When the Cold War ended, the U.S. and Russia could have been allies. You know that? But we tricked Gorbachev. We promised him that if he agreed to unify Germany, NATO wouldn’t expand one inch east. Then, a few years later, NATO starts adding members. Oh, sorry about that little promise we made! You believed us? You poor schmucks. You second-rate country, you. Then, a few years later, we have the corrupt, alcoholic Boris Yeltsin—reviled by his people—running for reelection against a real, live Russian nationalist communist who’s about to win, right? But we can’t have that! The return of communism? No way! So what do we do? Lots of cold, hard U.S. cash gets dispensed liberally in Moscow to pay off whoever needs to be paid off. Whoever needs to dip their beaks. You probably never heard that two of Yeltsin’s aides were arrested with shoeboxes full of hundred-dollar bills, did you?”

Paul shook his head.

“We did whatever it took, sloshed around whatever dirty money it took, to ensure democracy would live on in Russia. We swung the election. The vote was rigged. Maybe a little bit ironic, huh? Then we forced Yeltsin to choose a successor, and who might that be? The guy who became the czar and still rules Russia with an iron hand. Russia today wouldn’t be so fucked up if we hadn’t stuck our hand in and manipulated things the way we did. Thank the CIA for the fucked-up hand we now have.” He shook his head and, for a long moment, didn’t speak. Finally, he said, “Let me see it.”

“See what?”

“The memory stick. Where is it now?”

“In my possession.”

“Let me have a look.”

“It’s not with me,” Paul said.

“Back in your hotel room?”

Paul wished he had a hotel room. Maybe later. He was exhausted and needed a good night’s sleep.

“Why don’t you go get it? I may be able to figure something out about it.”

Paul shook his head slowly. “Can’t do that. It’s in a safe-deposit box,” he lied. In fact, it was in his backpack on the floor next to him. “Does anyone know I’m meeting with you?”

“How do I know? They tap phones. Maybe you talked on a mobile phone. That’s easy—”

“I’ve got to go,” Paul said, and as he shifted his legs to stand up, the dog uttered a throaty warning growl.