Altria had known that accepting Thomas Paine as her client would be the defining challenge of her career so far. Up until now, it had been a series of undeniable successes. She knew that it was her looks that made her valuable to clients, but it was her record on the Valuestream that had gotten the attention of her employers.

Her profile on the 'Stream had no pictures. Her father had been clever enough to prevent her from using her real name on any of the social networks that her friends had begged her to join. So when she had submitted her first projects online editors shredded them. It was the kind of criticism that she had never gotten from her teachers in school up to that point.

The next project that she submitted got some quiet praise, and enough critiques that she could finally learn about her strengths as a scholar. She had never gotten around to thanking Mr. Paine for that, and she was afraid that she never would. She wanted to thank him especially for the critiques that he had personally provided for her senior thesis.

As a child she had always known that she wanted to work for the government. Her parents had both been public servants, two of her brothers had served in the Army, and her grandfather had been a judge. When she was 12, she got her first security clearance-- to appear with President Bush at a fundraiser. Her parents had been mortified when she asked him how long the War on Terror was going to last.

For all her certainty that she would become a public servant, choosing a specific route had proven impossible for her. Her research in college had flitted from topic to topic so that her advisor wondered if there was any way for her to use all of it for her senior project. The one constant in her work was a glowing respect for the structure of government and a faith that government could do real and lasting good.

Eventually, she had just elected to write a treatise on the philosophical underpinnings of the law. Much of her work referred to the social contract. The last draft of her final paper had one of those titles that made magazine editors cringe: "A review of the historical expansion of the role of government in providing services for participants of the social contract."

Her thesis was that the congregation of mankind into cities established an environment where a centralized government could provide all essential services for the entirety of the population.

For a blissful two weeks, the paper received minimal editing and largely positive reviews. When the advisory board at her university granted her permission to graduate, she thought that her career as a voice of the law was begun.

That night she and her close friends stayed out until the sun came up. When the cab dropped her off at the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, she felt like she was already a public servant, expanding the knowledge of the public mind.

She was brushing her teeth when she remembered the first rule for serving in the public sphere: be available. So she went to her computer and checked for messages. When she saw that her paper had been reviewed, she couldn't help but want to look at another glowing panegyric.

What she found instead was a few paragraphs and a name that would change the fate of her career.

"Ms. Converez's paper is extremely well written. There are few assertions made in the thesis that can be contested, however, I must assert that her major assertions be called into question by several omitted facts.

"Firstly, the historical growth of government is far from an established fact. In every case where governments fail, services are, at least temporarily, partly or completely curtailed. In the case of the American Revolution, actions of the British government to impose greater governance on the colonial population was one of the leading causes of the revolt.

"More importantly, in every population, there exists groups whose greatest desire is to be left alone. Quakers, for example, accept few services from the government. Are Quakers to be responsible for supplying resources for the ever-expanding services which Ms. Converez says are to be provided by the state?

"In our culture the most vocal group which opposes the expansion of government service is the Libertarian Party. A libertarian exposed to the major idea of Ms. Converez's paper would have major questions about who and how these services are to be funded. They would even question why the government has a role to play here at all. Ms. Converez answers that they have a role because they are participants in the social contract.

“Moreover, governmental supply of services to some of the population at the expense of others is well-documented. Your paper’s neglect of continued repression and persecution of African American and Native communities is a significant oversight.

"As members of our social contract, they have agreed to obey certain laws and pay certain taxes. Nowhere did they consent to fund government investment in every field. However, to say that the social contract does not include any of the services that she suggests is to legislate a morality of Libertarian ideals. However, to say that the government has a right to collect taxes to provide open-ended services is to legislate an extremely liberal morality.

"This suggests something to me about the inevitability of legislating morality.” --Julius Thomas Socrates Paine"

As she blinked away tears she knew that he was right. She had meant every word of that paper, and the liberal professors on her graduation board had shared the values that her paper had assumed. She had poured her heart and soul into that paper, and her greatest hopes for the future. That did not mean that her solution was a tenable one for the world.

When people put beauty at the center of their lives, it makes them happy. Almost everyone she had ever known had put her at the center of theirs, but not this man who had never seen her face. It was the lesson in perspective that she had needed her entire life.

Her liberal values were on the fringe, and while her intellectual contribution would be of value to left-wing think tanks, the offers that she had hoped for from the non-partisan intelligentsia of Washington would not be coming.

She was right. The offers did not come.

What came instead was a dashing gentleman with a very shiny badge offering her an opportunity to touch the lives of the most important men and women in the world.

She accepted.

Her regular staff came to consist of three people. The agency had wanted to give her more, but she had insisted. Three could handle the only jobs that needed doing. She was learning that the world of international courtesy was all about appearances, and for most of her clients, their concern was more for the appearance of competence than for anything more than a cursory minimum of physical care.

Montgomery was the highest paid member of her staff. He was her intellectual appearance man. Her education had left her with a very broad base of knowledge. Monty seemed to have swallowed an encyclopedia whole on his 5th birthday and lived on a daily diet of news since that day. She had spent a month trying to stump him. When she thought that she finally had, it turned out that her source was wrong. After that she stopped questioning him. He simply was never mistaken.

He spoke to her through a subdermal earpiece during operations. Even though the device was smaller than her pinky nail, she hadn't told any of her family about it. Her mother would have gone into hysterics about scars and cancer.

Many of her clients had commented on her exceptional knowledge; when they did, she would always just smile and say that her team worked hard to keep her well-prepared. Besides his mental skills, Montgomery was an exceptionally neurotic man passionately obsessed with his pleasant-looking wife.

Travis was a massive man who served as her driver and visible security. During one of her rare nights out, he had been the doorman at a club. She hadn't waited in line to get into a party since she was 15 years old, but he had let two shocked-looking men in before her. She had instantly liked him.

Later that night two large drunks had gotten into a scuffle and she had watched Travis pick his way through the crowd to get to the scene. Despite his bulk, no one in his path spilled so much as a drop of their drink. When he got to the scene in an alarmingly short amount of time, he grabbed both offenders by the back of their necks and carried them at arm’s length out of the bar.

She had offered him a job the next morning. When she discovered he had an abiding affection for small Asian men it had been icing on the proverbial cake. When she had discovered his deep insight into human nature, she had given him a raise.

The last person with whom she worked every day was a secretary by the name of Callissa. When they had first met, it was obvious that Callissa had been instantly smitten. After a brief dalliance, Calli had simply said that she was over it and the relationship had become strictly professional. What remained from their time as lovers was a fierce protectiveness that had saved Altria's life on more than one occasion.

If Travis was her obvious security, Callissa was her secret ninja. They had met as trainees in the same government-issue self-defense course. Calli had been sparring with their instructor. It had taken a few views of the film for the class to understand what exactly had happened, but the instructor managed to piece together a rough outline. Calli had slipped underneath his guard and executed a hip throw; he was 80 pounds heavier.

Instead of waiting for him to fall, she had caught his hand during his descent, twisted it, and maneuvered him onto his stomach with his hand straight in the air and slammed him into the ground.

She was fast, coordinated, and every inch of her body was covered in muscles harder than most people's bones. Yet she tried to never show it. She always dressed in demure clothing that concealed her form. She insisted that a true professional would be able to recognize her balance, so she had tried to adopt a haphazard walk when appearing in public.

They had once played disc golf together. It had been enough to convince her male friends never to go play with Altria's friend Calli again.

On the occasion of each of Mr. Paine's transmissions, she had immediately called to her staff and shunned all public media until they had the opportunity to view it together.

Since Paine’s most recent disappearance, there had been a palpable sense of distress at all of her team’s meetings. As their boss, she knew that meant she was not doing her job. She also knew that she was the one projecting the most distress. More than her reputation being at stake, she knew that she had some real feelings for Julius Paine, her client. It had been Calli that pointed it out to her after the first operation at the top of the VI building.

"You look different." She had begun in her usual blunt way. "Oh."

"What?" Altria remembered asking.

Calli had answered, "You catch feels?"

"What do you mean? You can't seriously think that I love him after meeting him for the first time." She had put every drop of acidic incredulity into her voice she could manage.

"Just ask Travis."

After that first operation she had watched the tape and couldn't deny what her team was telling her. She had brought the information to her superiors with the expectation that she would be removed from the case. Word came down that he would remain her client but that she was to deny those feelings to the utmost of her ability. To say that her first emotion was anything other than relief would be a lie, but after the giddiness faded, something about the pronouncement struck her as disingenuous.

It was the first time her employers had demonstrated anything other than the most insightful and professional behavior. She knew that trying to deny her feelings would only intensify them, and so must they. She had never brought it up with her staff, but there was still something very wrong there.

She was so worried about Julius. It drove her to work harder, but at some point soon, she would run out of things to do.

The initial instinct of her superiors was that every effort should be made to prevent the dissemination of the video messages. Their position was that she had been employed to prevent inflammatory behavior on the part of her client. If the messages were anything like what the first suggested they would be, then there would be no good coming from them.

In her response to her explanation that it would be impossible to stop the videos spread without co-opting every satellite receiver on the planet, they had told her that her work was far from over and to do nothing until they provided her with further instructions.

She always took the subway to work. As the train clattered into her stop she thought again about the strange call that she had gotten the night before from Montgomery. He had called her the night before and said that he had a theory that he wanted to discuss the next day. When she said that now would be better, he had insisted that it didn't matter until tomorrow.

She walked out of the subway tunnel and her mobile got three messages at the same time. The first was from Calli saying that the client had released another video and that the team was waiting. The next was from the Valuestream, telling her that her senior thesis had received a new edit. The final was from her boss, and the time indicated that it had come in 20 minutes after the first. The most wealthy nation on the planet and she still couldn't get service in the subway.

It just said: DISCREDIT HIM