the honeytrap sprung

"Putatively" is the load-bearing word: everything about the too-perfect encounter is A.F.R. tradecraft. Minutes after Orin drops Helen Steeply — herself pursuing "lines of family-linen inquiry" — at the airport, this "incredible specimen" approaches him "unbidden, unStrategized" and produces, from one bag, exactly the props a honeytrap for this target needs: professionally lovely hands, a Cardinal-souvenir football to autograph "for her toddler-age son" (the young-mother hook Orin cannot resist), and "her Swiss passport." A meeting engineered to look like fate, baited precisely to a man whose need "to be assured that for a moment he has her" makes him the softest imaginable mark. Two intelligence services work him in a single afternoon, and he reads the second as the universe reaching out a steadying hand.