Wearing my boxers and an undershirt, I put on the stereo—it’s a Duke Ellington kind of night—and then find my laptop.

Granted, it might have been more exciting if I had stayed in Boston working in corporate law (and who knows, maybe this décor would be just my cup of tea). I would be out schmoozing with clients instead of reading Genevra’s report on one of our suspects right now. God knows I’d be socking away more money for retirement. Maybe I’d even have a girl named Peaches curled up at the end of the sofa. But in spite of what my mother thinks, I am happy. I cannot imagine doing anything except what I do and liking it more.

I’d first gotten an internship with HRSP when it was still called OSI, the Office of Special Investigations. My grandfather, a World War II vet, had regaled me with stories of combat my whole life; as a boy my most prized possession was an M35 Heer steel helmet that he gifted to me, with a dark spot on the inside he swore was brain matter. (My mother, disgusted, removed it from my room one night while I was asleep and to this day hasn’t told me what she did with it.) In college, hoping to pad my résumé before I went to law school, I took the job at OSI. I expected legal experience I could put on my applications. What I got instead was passion. Everyone in that office was there because they wanted to be, because they truly believed that what they did was important, no matter what the Pat Buchanans of the world said about the U.S. government wasting money to hunt down people who were too old to be a threat to the general population.

I went to Harvard Law and had my choice of offers from Boston firms when I graduated. The one I picked paid me enough to buy fancy suits and a sweet Mustang convertible, which I never had time to joyride in, because I was working furiously on a track toward becoming a junior partner. I had cash, I had a fiancée, and 95 percent of my litigation had resulted in a verdict for the defendant I was representing. But I missed caring.

I wrote to the director of OSI and moved to Washington one month later.

Yeah, I know that my head is more often mired in the 1940s than the 2010s. And true, if you spend too much time living in the past, you never move forward. But then again, you can’t tell me what I do isn’t necessary. If history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn’t someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning? If not me, then who?

The Duke Ellington track ends. To fill the silence, I turn on the television. I watch Stephen Colbert for about ten minutes, but he’s too entertaining to be background noise for me. I keep finding myself pulled away from Genevra’s report to listen to his patter.

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