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votes swept it away from me.”
    Ronald knew exactly what this meant. Jack had engineered his own defeat. The primary rule of this group was not to become high-profile enough to get noticed. “I’m sorry, man.”
    Jack shrugged. “I’ll have to give up this role pretty soon anyway. Been at it long enough.”
    â€œThat will be a relief, I’m sure,” Ronald said. He had a smooth,preppy-sounding east coast accent which no one was quite sure was phony. But he could do other voices as well, in any of four languages. Jack had heard many of them, starting when they were at school together years earlier.
    â€œNo, I’ll miss it,” Jack said of being a gamer. “It’s fun. I could just quit for a while and come back. In three years it’ll be a whole new generation. No one will have heard of me.”
    â€œYeah, man, but then you’ll be, like, thirty.” Ronald was doing a Valley Boy voice now.
    â€œWhat about you? You rich again yet?”
    A few years earlier Ronald, or rather a few of his companies, had made an enormous fortune in some dot-com startups. He had funneled most of the money into this group’s secret coffers, then, when he was in danger of making
Fortune’s
list of billionaires, had “gone broke” in a quiet way. In answer to Jack’s question, he looked sideways around the room, as if fearing eavesdroppers, and said in a completely fake voice, “Me? Nah. Nah. Just a working man. Up at dawn, milking the computers, collecting the eggs.”
    They both laughed again. God, it was a relief to be here.
    Jack circulated, hugged old friends, genuflected to respected elders. One asked, “Did you suggest a caterer for the affair to your friend the ambassador?”
    Without asking how the man knew, Jack shook his head. “No, sir. Can you recommend someone?”
    The man was ready with advice. “I think you should go through Italy rather than Paris. Everyone should be more comfortable than that. And of course now you can’t have a Swiss presence.” Jack knew what he meant. The semi-rational dictator the American ambassador had invited to the peace conference had declared a jihad against Switzerland a few years earlier; no point in provoking him needlessly.
    The man scribbled a name, and Jack took it gratefully before moving on.
    A few minutes later Jack was back standing with Ronald, chatting quietly along with three other old friends, when the door opened and Arden Spindler entered. Arden wasn’t particularlywell-known here, having been recruited into the group only a year or so ago. But Ronald knew her, as did two other people in their small conversational group, and they all stopped talking, staring at the young woman with fascination, the way a prairie dog stares at a snake.
    â€œWhat? Who?” said the fifth person. “Her? The one who just came in?”
    â€œDon’t say anything,” Jack whispered.
    â€œDon’t look at her. Erase her from your thoughts,” Ronald added. “Keep talking. What about this new National Security Advisor? Oh, shit, she’s coming this way.”
    The group suddenly scattered, leaving Jack and the woman who didn’t know Arden to face her alone, as the friendly young woman made her slow way across the room toward them.
    Exit Interview
    Three months later, after everything was smashed to pieces, the Circle destroyed and all Jack’s friends gone, he began to talk to his fifth interrogator. To the first four he had said nothing, not even his name, though they knew a great deal about him already. But Jack didn’t tell them anything, even after they dropped any pretense of civilized rules and began torturing him.
    The interviews took place in a small windowless room that felt as if it were deep inside a much larger space. The prisoner had been interrogated many times over the last week by several different interrogators who had run the full range: