Fourth.  Irina Derevko.

The photo is rendered in black and white, the edges of everything blurry and indistinct, as if someone has been rubbing it down with a pencil eraser.  It is not a photo, per se, though it has been blown up and thrown down on glossy photo paper.  It is a still, the best of many bad shots of a blurry, indistinct taupe hallway. 

She does not look directly at the camera, but a little bit below it, turning her head back over one shoulder.  The camera hangs above her, a bit behind, as all security cameras seem to do.  Her face is still, difficult to read, but she has the look of one standing on edge, like an animal scenting the wind.  She feels the camera's presence, even if she does not see it, and continues her quick steps down the hall.

They showed him this photo six weeks after Laura died, paperclipped to the top of a thick file, "classified" stamped in black across the cover.  They dropped it on the table before him, the weight of it jarring the table and clanking against his leg irons.  They pointed, and questioned, and watched the tiny motions of his hands, and the sweat on his neck, and his eyes.  They wanted to hear answers, to see his photo alongside hers, striding down a gray corridor.  But he had no answers, no information.  He did not know what day this was taken.  He recognized the woman.  He gave her that blouse: crimson silk that set off the soft glow of her dark hair. 

He remembers this picture, burned into his memory, sealed in with the clank of an iron door.  In this photograph, he met a woman named Irina Derevko. 

Fifth.  Broken Trust.

Another black-and-white, another blurry still.  The woman at the far end is difficult to recognize, no more than a supposition.  She stands at a conference table, both hands flat on the table in front of her.  The hands are large, the fingers long.  He believes the picture when he sees them. 

Her shining hair is bound up in a loose knot behind her head, a mere dark blot on the print.  She stands at the far left of the picture, while everyone around her sits.  All men, all white, all wearing some variation of the same dark suit.  Some look down at the files in their hands, but most look at her.  The camera shows only the dark blot, the tapered back of her suit, the splay of her hands. 

He found the photo at Langley after he took the risk of breaking in.  He'd seen most of the material there before, but the snapshot caught him by surprise.  Dated fourteen months after her  disappearance, seven months after they let him out of solitary, the photo is the best the CIA had to show for the twenty years it spent tracking Irina Derevko. 

He nearly choked when he saw it.  His vision clouded and his throat constricted and he wondered for a moment if this was what it felt like to have a heart attack. 

Twenty years after she broke him, a snapshot told him that Irina Derevko was still alive. 

Sixth.  Memory.

She carried a picture in her head, she told him.  A loving husband, a generous man, a patriot.  That picture, she said, was gone.

They stood across from one another for the first time in twenty years, in a bare room, plexiglass wall between them.  So many things between them. 

He watched an image slip away, saw its last embers flicker in her dark eyes, even as he concentrated on keeping his own face blank, his voice even.  Seeing her again, standing there, he formed a new image, a picture that would haunt him.  He could not be sure, at that time, what it would come to mean.