Chapter 4
There were times when Bian Nguyen never left “the Castle”—as TIA Headquarters was called by its inmates—for days on end. There was little reason to. The nature of the operation forced the kitchen to be on call twenty-four hours a day, preparing meals for anyone who needed them; Bian’s office had an anteroom equipped with its own private shower, toilet, and full-length mirror; she kept a closetful of clothes and a complete make-up kit on the premises; and the anteroom couch was more than comfortable after some of her thirty- or forty-hour stints of straight work. Sometimes she even wondered why she bothered to pay rent on her elegant apartment in town; she was seldom there except to exchange her dirty office clothes for clean ones now and then.
Most of her colleagues would have
