Michael sat in the center of his study, surrounded by screens that glowed with the pale blue light of information he could no longer trust. The room was deliberately cold, maintained at a temperature that kept him alert, that prevented the comfortable drowsiness that led to mistakes. He wore a dark sweater, no jacket, his sleeves rolled to the forearms in a gesture of preparation that had become habit over decades. Before him, spread across three monitors, were the intelligence reports from his five embedded assets—reports he had reviewed a hundred times without seeing what they were actually telling him.
Until tonight.
