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friend.” He opens a sort of gray credit card wallet and shows it to Kasper.
    FBI. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
    That’s what it says, in big letters. But it doesn’t mean a thing. As far as Kasper’s concerned, it’s just another trap. He shakes his head. “Go fuck yourself,” he repeats.
    “You’re not ever getting out of here. You know that, don’t you?” says the blond one.
    “If you say so.”
    “The prisons here aren’t like the ones in Italy, where you drop in every so often, stay for a few days, and then come out again and go right back to fucking up. Here they’re serious. There’s a reeducation program already in place for you. And if you stay here, we can’t help you.”
    Kasper’s familiar with such a program. He’s already been given a few classes during his first days in prison. And now he realizes that the whole thing has a “Made in USA” stamp on it.
    In the week Kasper has been detained they’ve hooded him, beaten him, tortured him.
    They’ve crammed him into a cement niche a very thin person could barely fit into. It’s the live burial technique, used to make you grasp what it feels like to be flung into a grave. They close you up and leave you in there for hours. If Kasper wasn’t driven mad, it’s only because, as a well-trained agent, he was able to control his claustrophobic panic.
    They’ve waterboarded him in the Cambodian style: tied to a kind of rocking chair, a towel on his face, and water poured on the towel, choking him.
    Kasper recognized the methods. They’re the same ones used in Guantánamo. The same ones that the CIA, in the name of national security, has employed in many parts of the world. They amount to unremitting torment. When a prisoner begs his captors to kill him, he’s not acting like a hero. He’s asking for a favor.
    And now these two Americans come in, passing themselves off as representatives of two domestic agencies.
    It’s an old trick. If they think he’s going to fall for it, they must really consider him an idiot. Good cop, bad cop. Pathetic bastards, Kasper thinks.
    They want to know everything he knows.
    They want to be clear about what he’s uncovered. Names. Places. Every detail.
    He already told Darrha what he knew, or thought he knew. He swore there was nothing to add to what he’d already reported to the person who commissioned the North Korean investigation.
    “I haven’t hidden anything from you, not a fucking thing.” He shouted with all his might: “I’ve told you everything!” He defended Clancy: “He’s got nothing to do with this. He doesn’t know anything about that mission.”
    But it was no good. It wasn’t enough. He saw that right away. Because evidently there’s something he doesn’t know but might have found out. Or maybe guessed.
    It’s the reason they won’t let him go.
    It’s the reason he’s supposed to die.

4
The Prisoner
    Attorney Barbara Belli’s Office, Quartiere Prati, Rome
    Friday, May 9, 2008
    Barbara stretches out her legs under the desk. She’d like to take a goddamned cigarette break, like in the good old days when she was a law student and spent nights poring over legal textbooks. A thousand pages in her head, and in her lungs a nicotine level that the Institute for Health and Preventive Care would have assessed as “interesting.” She dutifully reminds herself that she quit smoking ten years ago, when she got pregnant with the first of her two sons.
    She’s quit doing a lot of things over the past ten years. And her passion for her work is also becoming a thing of the past.
    She examines the two women in front of her. They dropped in unannounced, no call, no appointment of any kind. “An urgent matter,” they explained.
    She made them sit in the waiting room for a good half hour before having them shown in.
    Then she listened to them. She didn’t interrupt them with many questions, and the ones she asked were those strictly necessary to her understanding of the situation. But