Overview
An unnamed intelligence officer from an Eastern European country has been living under deep cover in a western capital for eleven years. He has a job, colleagues, a routine. He is very good at all of it.
One morning, images of his home city under aerial bombardment appear on the office television. His colleagues gather to watch. Someone makes tea. Someone else says something about the geopolitics. The officer stands with them, watching images of the city where his mother lives, and says nothing, because saying something would require an explanation of how he knows the city, and the explanation would end his cover and his career and possibly his life.
He maintains his cover for fourteen days. During those fourteen days he cannot call his mother, cannot acknowledge what he is watching, cannot respond to any of the small expressions of sympathy his colleagues extend to people from that part of the world. The story traces those two weeks with the granular precision of a man counting hours. At the end of them, he learns his family survived. The story does not tell us what he does with this information.
