Kittleson's name had been on the newsroom whiteboard since Friday, written with the blue marker they used for correspondents in war zones, and the blue marker meant that the person was in a place where communications could be interrupted and where the interruption of communications was not necessarily an emergency, because in Iraq communications were interrupted for reasons that ranged from electrical blackouts to mobile network congestion during air raids to the simple decision to turn off the phone to sleep, and the newsroom protocol said the blue marker stayed on the whiteboard for forty-eight hours without anyone doing anything and that after forty-eight hours the marker became red and that red meant 'contact the embassy.'

Nora was the foreign desk editor and her job during the forty-eight hours of the blue marker consisted of not doing the job she would do with the red marker, that is not calling the embassy, not calling the Baghdad fixer, not calling the family, not writing anything on the site, because the protocol existed to prevent anxiety from producing actions anxiety should not produce; Nora's anxiety was a type of anxiety that manifested in the hands, in the hands that went toward the phone and that Nora stopped before the phone was in her hand, every time, every half hour, for forty-eight hours, and Nora's hands were the protocol incarnated in the body, the protocol that said 'not yet', the hands that said 'now', the difference between the two that was Nora's job.

Kittleson's last article had arrived Friday morning at six forty-two Baghdad time, twelve forty-two New York time. The article was in the editorial system with the status 'draft', the provisional title 'The handlers', the body of the text one thousand two hundred and forty-seven words; the last sentence was: 'The third intermediary, the one who never gave his name and whom colleagues call the Dentist because.' Because. The sentence ended with 'because' and after 'because' there was nothing, not a period, not a comma, not a space; the absence of any mark after 'because' meant that Kittleson had stopped writing at that point, at that moment, between the 'because' and what the 'because' would have introduced.

Nora read the article twice. The first time for the content: the intermediaries between armed groups and private security companies, the payments, the money movements. The second time for the structure: the article was built like a concentric-circle investigation, from the outer circle (the public contracts) to the inner circle (the intermediaries), and the innermost circle, the one where the Dentist stood, was the circle where the sentence broke off.

The forty-eight hours of the blue marker passed with the slowness of the forty-eight hours that separate anxiety from procedure. Nora ate at her desk. She slept two hours on the meeting room couch. She checked the whiteboard every time she passed it, and every time Kittleson's name was there, in blue, and the blue meant 'not yet' and Nora's hands stayed at her sides.

At the forty-ninth hour Nora took the red marker and erased the blue and wrote KITTLESON in red. The red on the whiteboard had a different weight from the blue: the blue was information, the red was a decision. Nora called the embassy. The voice on the other end said they had no information on this person and asked for the details of the stay: the hotel, the fixer's name, the date of last contact. Nora gave the details. The voice said they would look into it and call back.

Nora went back to the desk and Kittleson's article was still open on the screen with the cursor blinking after 'because,' and the screen was the only thing in the newsroom that had not moved in the last forty-nine hours, because the newsroom around the screen had continued to function, colleagues had written other articles, answered other phone calls, drunk other coffees; nobody had asked Nora what was on the screen because nobody asked what was on the screen when the marker was red, and the not-asking was another form of protocol, the protocol of silence that surrounds the red name, and Nora sat in front of the 'because' that blinked and the colleagues passed behind her chair without looking at the screen the way one passes behind a person who prays without looking at what she prays to; the coffee in Nora's cup had gone cold, the cold coffee was the body that had forgotten to drink because the body was doing other work.

The embassy called back three hours later. The voice was different from the first one: slower, with the pauses of someone reading from a sheet. «A person matching the description was seen in a café in the Karrada district on Friday. From that point we have nothing further.» Pause. «We are checking with local authorities.» Nora knew the language of embassies: local authorities meant the Iraqi police, and the Iraqi police in a kidnapping in Baghdad were not the solution.

The editor came by Nora's desk at three in the afternoon and asked if Kittleson had sent the article, and Nora said the article was in the system since Friday, and the editor asked if it was complete, and Nora said the last word was 'because' and that after 'because' there was nothing, and the editor looked at the screen and read the sentence and stood behind Nora's chair for eleven seconds that Nora counted because counting seconds had become her way of being inside the forty-eight hours, and the editor said «File it» and went back to his office. The door closed with the sound of doors that close when the person closing them has already decided.

Nora waited for the editor's door to close. She waited for the footsteps in the corridor to fade. Then she put her hands on the keyboard and her hands did the work her hands knew how to do: the cursor on the panel, the status from 'draft' to 'published,' the confirmation click. The article went online at four twelve in the afternoon with the title 'The handlers' and the last word was 'because.' The reader arrived at the end and found the 'because' without an answer and the 'because' without an answer was more powerful than any answer because the reader knew the answer existed and the answer was in a place where the journalist could no longer reach it, and the place where the journalist could no longer reach it was the place where the journalist was now.