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“I—I don’t always watch the commercials,” Clarey admitted.

“Oh, well, we all have our little failings.” Spano leaned forward, his voice now pitched to persuasive decibels. “Normally, of course, you wouldn’t stoop to hypocrisy to gain friends, and quite right, too—people should accept you as you are or they wouldn’t be worthy of becoming your friends. But this is different. You have to be what they want, because you want something from them. You’ll have to suffer rebuffs and humiliations and never show resentment.”

“In other words,” Clarey said, “a secret agent is supposed to forget all about such concepts as self-respect.”

“If necessary, yes. But here self-respect doesn’t enter into it. These aren’t people and they don’t really matter. You wouldn’t be humiliated, would you, if you tried to pat a dog and it snarled at you?”

“Steff, he’s got to think of them as people until he’s definitely given them a clean bill of health,” Han Vollard protested. “Otherwise, the whole thing won’t work.”