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didn’t.”
    “Not like Charlie.”
    “No.”
    “But then calling you at all isn’t like him, either. Is it? I thought you two weren’t in contact.”
    “We weren’t.”
    “You’re revealing something to me here, then, aren’t you?”
    “Am I?”
    But of course, he was. Pincher could read the sub-text: that Charles Mallory had been one of his sources on the recent stories about Africa.
    “I can’t say I hadn’t suspected that,” he said. “But why do you think I can help you on this?”
    “Because you know my brother. You’ve worked with him, anyway.”
    Pincher made a sound—what could have been a sigh or a laugh or a cough. His deliberate silences were a good sign, Jon thought, so he didn’t say anything.
    “
I
haven’t done business with him in a while. But I know someone who has. Earlier this year.”
    “Okay.”
    “Someone who worked with your father, too. Here in Foggy Bottom. He’s in the private sector now. Satellites.”
    Jon Mallory waited.
    “Satellites,” Pincher repeated. “Okay? And that didn’t come from me.”
    “Wait.”
    But Herbert Pincher had already hung up.
    IT WAS NINE minutes later when Jon Mallory thought of Gus Hebron. Another face from his father’s funeral. A large man with a big wide face and steely eyes. At the gravesite, he had clapped Jon once on the back and then walked away through the veil of snow to his car, not saying a word. He’d skipped the reception.
    And Jon thought again of the face that should have been at the funeral but wasn’t.
    His brother’s.
    For some reason, Charlie had chosen to miss their father’s funeral.
    There was no listing for Gus Hebron in the current year’s phone book, but Jon found a “white pages” listing online, with an address in Reston, Virginia. A new listing. He called the number and listened to it ring. Six times, seven, eight. No answer. No voicemail.
    At 6:28, before going out to pick up some Chinese food for dinner, he tried again, and Gus Hebron answered. Jon Mallory immediately recognized the throaty way he said “Hello,” even though it had been close to twenty years since he had talked with him.
    “Gus Hebron?”
    “Speaking.”
    “This is Jon Mallory. I don’t know if you remember me.”
    He waited through a silence. Looked out at the old stone bench in the back yard, the place he liked to go to think.
    “Jonny Mallory? Of course. What’s the occasion?”
    “I’m calling about my brother.”
    “Yeah?” Jon heard clicking sounds in the background. “What about him? What’s up?”
    “I’m trying to find him.”
    “Oh? Okay.” Hebron breathed heavily again, and Mallory remembered that even as a twenty-something-year-old, he had always seemed short of breath. “Hey, listen, Jonny. I’m sort of in the middle of something here. But why don’t you come on over to my place? All right? If we’re going to talk, I’d rather do it in person, anyway. Okay?”
    “When?”
    “Come on over.”

SIX
    GUS HEBRON LIVED IN the Virginia suburb of Reston, the first planned post-war community in the United States. His house was a large brick colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac with lots of oaks and elms behind it. Three stories, tall French windows. Much too much house for one man living alone, which Jon Mallory suspected that Gus Hebron was.
    He had found a bio of Hebron online, along with some personal details. Eight years ago, he’d become partner in a commercial satellite business known as Sky Glass Industries Inc. It was sold last year to Boeing. Hebron’s division worked on defense and intelligence contracts, including surveillance projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. Before that, he had helped develop satellite programs for NASA and the National Security Agency. Born in upstate New York, Hebron had received his master’s degree from Georgetown, where he’d taken a class from Jon Mallory’s father. He’d served as a combat engineer officer in the