Stone thought Lance looked as though he needed a drink.

“Can I get you a drink, Lance?”

“Thank you, no. We’ve got a flap on – two agents missing in Afghanistan – and I have a meeting with the director in two hours.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“I have to make a recommendation,” Lance said. “We think we know where they are: Do we send in more people to get them and risk the lives of a hundred men, or do we call in an air strike and kill everybody.”

“Including the two agents?”

“That’s the decision. There’s a chopper waiting for me at the West Side helipad. That’s why I can’t deal with this right now.”

“Deal with what?”

“My brother, Barton.”

“Start at the beginning, Lance.”

“My brother is four years older than I. Barton has been a star all his life: In school, in sports, wherever he went, he was always the star. Our mother died in childbirth with me. When I was twelve, our father died, and Barton became a surrogate father. He joined the Marines during the war in Vietnam, right out of Harvard; got a commission, led a platoon. I was at Harvard then. By the time it was over he was a colonel, commanding a regiment. Nobody in the Marines had advanced so quickly since World War Two. He was sent to the War College and told he would be a general before long, perhaps a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

“Sounds like a spectacular career.”

“It was, until he abruptly resigned his commission and disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Nobody could find him. I tried and failed. When I was giving my commencement speech at my graduation I looked down and saw him in the audience, but when the thing was over, he had disappeared again. I didn’t see him again until tonight.”