Michael gave Duke’s leash a slight yank to get him to slow down. “I’m not sad they’re dead either. I’ve seen up close and personal the way they do business, and I couldn’t be happier that they’re gone. My problem is that I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea
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that I may have set this whole thing in motion by relaying a highly classified piece of information that I wasn’t even supposed to know.”
Seamus waited for another walker to pass before he gave his answer. “We went over this before you told him. You commanded a recon unit when you were in the Corps. If some little silver-spoon millionaire politician compromised a mission that you and your men were on because he had had one too many martinis … and his loose lips lead to the deaths of half of your unit, would you want to know?”
Michael sighed deeply and said, “Yes.”
“That’s all the farther you need to look, Michael.” Seamus took several more puffs off his pipe while they walked. “Have you talked to anyone else about this?”
“No.”
“Not even Liz?”
“No.”
“Good. Keep it under your hat. If our boy is behind this, we’re fortunate. This is the first chance we’ve had for real change in thirty years.”
“I agree. It’s just that something like this could spin out of control real fast, and I don’t want to see him get taken down.”
“Don’t worry. He isn’t going to get caught. He’s been doing this for years, in places a hell of a lot more dangerous than the United
States.”
Director Thomas Stansfield sat in his office with only his desk lamp on.
Outside the window of his corner office, powerful floodlights illuminated the formidable compound of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Three years ago he would never have been found in the office on a Sunday night. He would have been sitting at home with his wife.
Stansfield’s demanding job required him to work some long and strange hours, but
Sunday evenings had been the one night of the week, barring an international crisis, when he would drop everything to be at home.
He and his wife would typically watch 60 Minutes while making dinner, maybe relax in front of a fire, watch a movie, and then call the girls out on the West Coast. They had
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two daughters, both married, one living in Sacramento and the other in San Diego. This calm, comforting, and loving part of Thomas Stansfield’s existence had vanished with little notice.
Sara Stansfield had left his life too quickly. During a routine physical, a tumor had been discovered. When the doctors went in to take it out, they found that the cancer had already spread to several glands.
Two months later, Sara was dead. It had been the most painful two months of
Stansfield’s life.
That he worked in a profession where emotions were looked on as a liability-a profession where tough-minded and emotionally neutral people played a serious game—
did not help things. When Sara died, Stansfield had been the Agency’s director for just over a year. Just when he’d reached the top of his profession, he’d lost the most important person in his life. Those who were close to him offered their private condolences, and they were appreciated. Some offered to help with the workload until he was up to it, but
Stansfield had kindly refused.
After Sara’s funeral, he spent several days with his daughters and three grandchildren, reminiscing about his beautiful wife and their loving mother and grandmother. The sons—
in-law respected the feelings of a very private man and kept their distance. When the weekend was over, he put his loved ones on a plane and went back to work. Even three years later, Sara was often on his mind. The pain was gone and had been replaced by fond memories, hard work, and trips to see his daughters and grandchildren. Stansfield was a first in the history of CIA directors.
He had no military experience, he was not a lawyer or a politician, and he was not Ivy
League educated. Stansfield had entered the Agency during the mid-fifties, after graduating from the University of South Dakota. He had something the Agency was searching for desperately-he was fluent in three languages: English, German, and
Russian. Being raised on a farm in rural South Dakota during the pre-television days gave his German- immigrant father and his Russian-immigrant mother plenty of time to teach their children the languages, customs, and folklore of their native lands. Stansfield had been one of the CIA’s most productive agents during the fifties and sixties. In the seventies he became a case officer, in the early eighties he was the Agency’s station chief in Moscow, and then in the late eighties he became the deputy director of operations. At the time, he thought he’d reached the end of the ladder.
That was until the previous President did something that surprised everyone. The
CIA, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, had grown to rely heavily on nonhuman data. They were
