She made the call at six-fifteen in the morning to a woman in Barcelona who had been her closest intelligence source for twenty-two years, which meant she had been her closest intelligence source for longer than most of the people in this house had been alive.
The woman's name was Pilar, and Pilar had the specific quality of intelligence that came from having spent a lifetime at the edges of powerful things, absorbing information by proximity without ever being positioned as someone who collected it. This was the most reliable kind. Pilar did not broker information. She held it, and when Elena asked, she shared what was relevant, and this was a relationship that had survived because both of them understood its terms completely.
Elena listened for forty minutes. She asked four questions. She thanked Pilar with the specificity of someone who understood that thanks was a form of currency and should be delivered with appropriate weight. She hung up.
