Merritt Kinsella

Merritt Kinsella is 54 and a counterintelligencecounterintelligence Work of detecting and stopping foreign spies who try to steal secrets from a country or its agencies. officer at a foreign intelligence agency, suspended from his post since 1999. Born in Buffalo, the son of a railroad guard, he joined the agency at 23 after a master's in Russian history and spent three decades reading letters, telegrams and complaints. He was the one who spent the longest hunting the spy who signs as Ivory, until he became the suspect.

He lives in a gray-painted wooden house three blocks from the park, with a cramped study full of cardboard boxes his wife asks him to throw away. His phone is tapped, his car is followed, and he has grown used to waving at the van parked on the corner. He walks the park trail every evening, taking the long loop through the brush, and says it's the only hour when nobody asks anything.

He is thin and gray, with a short unshaven beard, tired eyes with deep dark circles and a mouth that always seems about to deliver an irony. He wears a navy windbreaker over a turtleneck, khaki trousers and keeps his hands in his pockets. He is dry, repeats the same answers with the patience of someone worn out, and only brightens when the subject is the Ivory letter.

About Sunday, his account is that of a man of routine: he entered the trail at 7:10 p.m., took the long loop and stopped a few minutes on the bridge, as he always does. He knows the surveillance boys noted everything, because they wait for him on the bridge every day. He says he never took a cent from anyone, and that only his brother-in-law still invites his family to the barbecue.

Merritt knows the man who hunted Ivory and then found himself hunted has the worst of all scenarios: whoever accuses a lot ends up accused. When the detective accuses him of leaving the package under the bridge, he says two years of surveillance never found anything because there is nothing and threatens to rise from his chair. It could be the anger of someone who only wants his name cleared. It could be someone who keeps a minor secret to hide another. The detective will have to decide which.