Then he sent an urgent message requesting a face-to-face with Holm. They agreed to meet in the giant Pakistani port city of Karachi. The agency had two safe houses there, but the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency knew of both, so Holm preferred not to use them. Instead she picked a two-star hotel at random. Two-star hotels worked best for these meetings. They were crummy enough that the clerks didn’t ask questions, not so terrible that someone like her would attract attention.

She arrived at four p.m., two hours early. Two security officers and a tech operative were posted across the hall. The hotel was shabbier than she’d expected, linoleum floors and peeling yellow paint. It smelled of curry from the restaurant next door. Holm’s room, 308, was a ten-by-eight cell with a sagging twin bed and a broken television.

Holm locked the door, closed the curtains, and waved her handheld RF detector over the walls. Finding no bugs, she tucked the detector away and pulled a black lipstick tube from her cosmetics case. The tube was actually a fish-eye camera and microphone, with a transmitter that fed a recorder in the room across the hall. The images weren’t great, but the sound quality was excellent. She looked for a place to hide the camera, but couldn’t find one. Instead, she left it out on the nightstand. Men never noticed cosmetics. “Testing, one, two, three,” she said.

A minute later, she heard two knocks on her door, the tech across the hall letting her know the camera and mike were live. After that, she just had to wait. People outside the business never understood that spying was mainly waiting. Waiting for HQ to approve a mission. For a source to show up. For the excuse he’d give if he didn’t. For the nugget of information he’d been hoarding, lead disguised as gold. Waiting in dirty rooms, mall atriums, subway cars, armored Jeeps. Waiting and watching and hoping that the other side was just as bored.