o see inside Hoffstetler’s rented house on Lexington Street would be to peg him as the sort of fanatic who arranges toenail clippings by length. The home is beyond spare. It’s sparse. Cabinets and closets are kept empty and open. Nonperishable groceries remain in shopping bags on a folding table in the center of the kitchen. Perishable goods, too, remain in bags inside the refrigerator. There are no dressers in the bedroom; his spartan wardrobe is folded atop another table. He sleeps on a camping cot of steel frame and canvas. His medicine cabinet is bare, his pharmaceuticals holding military lines atop the toilet tank. The single trash can he keeps is emptied outside each night and scrubbed clean each week. All lights are bare bulbs; he has moved the fixtures to a box in the basement. The light, therefore, is harsh, and months after arrival, he still jumps at his own thrown shadows—some KGB operative, he always thinks, slinking close to cut short Hoffstetler’s overlong mission.

Keeping a shipshape residence complicates the placing of wiretaps, bugs, other black-bag jobs. He has no reason to think the CIA is onto him, yet every Saturday, when other men crack open beers and watch sports, he runs a putty knife around drawers, windows, heat vents, doorjambs, and soffits, then makes a special event, like other men do of family cookouts, of disassembling and reassembling the telephone. Televisions and radios are burdens he doesn’t need; he guts the phone in silence, pausing to read from library books that he returns, finished or not, every Sunday. It took the jarring sight of a janitor—identified by punch-card records as “Elisa Esposito”—dancing in front of an asset gone absolutely radiant for Hoffstetler to feel the full sadness of his lonely customs.

Today, though, his routine dislodging one of the hallway floorboards feels worse than dangerous. It feels wrong. It’s a detestable feeling. Wrong is the bailiwick of parents, schoolmarms, men of the cloth. Scientists have no need of it. Yet caught in his throat like a fish bone is the certainty that what he saw last night changes everything. If the asset can feel that kind of joy, affection, and concern—he espied all three in its chromatic flux—no nation, for any reason, should toy with it like a specimen in a Bunsen burner. In hindsight, even his own experiments, done with doctorly care, feel wrong. Of the many emotions the asset has stirred in Washington, at Occam, and in his own heart, how is it, Hoffstetler wonders, that not a single one of those emotions has been shame?

The hollow beneath the floor holds a passport, an envelope of cash, and the crinkled manila folder. Hoffstetler picks up the folder, hears the toot of a taxi, and forces the plank back into place. It always happens the same. He receives a brusque phone call with a specific time and a code phrase; he drops all that he is doing; he formulates a lateness excuse for David Fleming. Then he stews in anxious acids until the time arrives, calls a cab, gets inside, and records the cabbie’s name in a notebook to ensure no cabbie drives him to the meeting location more than once. Today’s driver is named Robert Nathaniel De Castro. Hoffstetler wagers that his friends call him “Bob.” What American name is more inoffensive or forgettable?

Past the airport, across Bear Creek Bridge, contiguous to the shipyards in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, the industrial park is not a place men in suits are often dropped. Hoffstetler’s wardrobe is limited to suits; blandness is his only disguise. He stows away his professorial peacock feathers and bores Robert Nathaniel De Castro with flavorless chatter and an unmemorable tip. He walks toward a warehouse until the cab is gone, then veers between container ships, past a transit shed, and over the tracks, doubling back around thirty-foot sand piles to make sure no one has followed.

He likes to sit atop a particular concrete block while waiting. He drums his heels on it like he’s a bored little boy back in Minsk. Soon a Chinese dragon of dirt floats across the sky while tires crunch gravel like gnashed bones. A titanic Chrysler swings into view, black as a crevasse with chrome like liquid mercury, its tail fins slicing loaves of risen dust. Hoffstetler slides off the concrete block and stands before the purring beast in the swirling grit—his papa would call it gryaz. The driver’s door opens and the same man as ever emerges, stretching a tailored suit across his bison breadth.

“The sparrow nests on the windowsill,” Hoffstetler says.

“And the eagle—” The Russian accent is thick. “The eagle…”

Hoffstetler reaches for the silver door handle. “And the eagle takes the prey,” he snaps. “What’s the point of using a code phrase if you can’t ever remember it?”