TROTTER WALKED INTO A fifties-vintage glass-and-turquoise-fronted building in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was as anonymous a place as you could find, one of two dozen or so interspersed among the fast-food places along the first two miles outside the D.C. line. They housed government contractors (Washington, D.C, being the nation’s ultimate one-industry town, Detroit notwithstanding) and companies that sold office furniture and stationery to government contractors. This particular building, Trotter learned from the directory, also housed a couple of low-budget lobbying groups (like the National Wooden Utensil Foundation) and the Greek-American Information Service, one of the dozens of special-interest journalistic enterprises that swarmed about the area.
The Agency was not in the directory. Trotter was willing to bet, however, that the Agency owned the building.
The Agency’s budget did not appear in that mound of telephone-directory-sized volumes the President submits to Congress every year. The Agency was not supposed to exist. It got its money in two ways—nickel-and-diming the budgets of dozens of different government departments, programs and agencies (Trotter’s father called this “spillage”); and from investments. Anonymous little office buildings in Silver Spring, for instance, and maybe one or more of the burger and chicken places across the street. No big earners, nothing to grab attention, but steady. And a lot of them. By the time Trotter had stopped working full-time for his old man, the Agency had been a whisker away from being self-supporting; by now, it was probably showing a profit.
It had taken a certain amount of insistence to get Albright to drop him off here, once he’d seen the place. He couldn’t believe that the Bureau, with all the space it could want over at Justice, would waste its time with a building like this. He finally faced the fact that this was indeed the address he’d been given, with suitable authorization codes, over the phone, and let Trotter go without further fuss.
The FBI had the huge establishment, marble pillars to lean on and everything. The Agency, on the other hand, traveled light, without a building, recognition, or even a name to its name.
It was just the Agency, founded after World War II by an OSS general who knew that there were going to be times when a Central Intelligence Agency would be too big, too procedure-bound, and too scrupulous to do what had to be done. He fought for, and got, a hyper-secret organization with no official jurisdiction and, therefore, no limits on what it could concern itself with. There would be no chain of command—each Agent would answer solely to him, and he only to the President.
That cozy setup lasted until Watergate. The press got a taste for blood, and the “National Interest” had been invoked so many times to cover embarrassing petty political bullshit that nobody would listen to it anymore. Congress was going to take a hand; Congress was going to oversee all American intelligence operations, and the President might not have the juice to resist.
So the General became the Congressman. He found a district in his home state and persuaded the good old boys of the local Democratic Committee to nominate him (he was a War Hero, after all) in a place where, once the nomination was in hand, the election was an afterthought.
Then he pulled strings until Washington looked like a spider-web, only nobody could find the spider. When it was over, the Congressman was the chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee. He did a hell of a job, too. Every spy outfit anyone had ever heard of had to admit that the Congressman was tough but fair. And the one nobody had ever heard of continued to operate as it always had.
Trotter followed the fallout-shelter signs, the ones that had been put up in the early sixties when, if people looked up, it was even money whether they were checking for rain or for Russian ICBMs. Nobody’d needed the shelters (they were inadequate from the start, anyway), and nobody checked on them or maintained them, but nobody ever got around to taking the signs down, either. They’d become invisible, unless you looked for them.
Trotter looked at them now, yellow-and-black signs streaked with red-brown rust, following the forgotten arrows to the basement, to a dirty, white-painted fire door. Around the thick edge of the door was a small button. There always was. Trotter pushed it, three shorts and a long. Trotter knew it was ridiculous, since it was certain he was being monitored by a hidden camera at this very second, but as his father frequently told him, a big part of the reason anybody was in this business was because of the game.
Or rather, The Game. Prisoner’s Base with real prisoners. Capture the Flag with real flags. The Game his father assured him was in his blood, no matter how loudly he claimed he hated it. The one he’d never be able to turn his back on, no matter how hard he tried.
Trotter preferred not to think about it. But then, here he was.
The door slid open. Trotter stepped in. Fenton Rines was there to greet him, offering a handshake but no smile.
Looking at him, Trotter doubted Rines ever smiled anymore. He was like one of the people in fairy tales whose wish coming true was the worst thing that ever happened to them.
Rines was a veteran FBI man, ex-Marine, legal and business education. Trotter had always thought he resembled the president of a small-town bank. He still did, but in a town that the economic recovery had passed by. He had always been a skilled and dedicated agent, but now his rugged, handsome face was harried, and his steel-gray hair was going white along the sides of his head.
He met Trotter with his jacket off, another first. His tie was loose and his sleeves were rolled up. This was a man with more on his mind than a dress code.
Because Rines had made a wish. Over the course of years, he had become aware of strange happenings in areas the FBI had some interest in. Convenient appearances and disappearances. Unlooked-for luck in the counterespionage business. Crimes and other sorts of mysterious operations that were obviously the work of top pros but made no sense. Phenomena, in short, his instinct told him were intelligence operations but which his connections showed to be attributable to no known intelligence agency.
Then, two years before, a young girl had been kidnapped and a truckload of dead bodies had been stolen. These events turned out to be tied together, as part of a Russian operation known as Cronus, and Trotter’s (successful) attempt to stop it.
And that led to Trotter—or Driscoll, as he was calling himself then. Trotter/Driscoll was the Congressman’s son, and suddenly, Rines’s wish had come true. He knew now about the Agency. But he wasn’t through with it. Rines had been caught between the Congressman and his son—he was the only person Trotter would trust with knowledge of his whereabouts.
Trotter supposed it wasn’t fair. The old man was as persuasive as Satan; it was inevitable he’d be using Rines as another operative, this one with access to, and a certain amount of control over, the facilities of the FBI.
“Anything to stretch the budget,” Trotter said.
Rines thought he meant the sparse furnishings. The place still looked like a fallout shelter, albeit one with a couple of desks, a telephone and fluorescent lighting. “Oh, he’s practically all moved out, here. The canned water will be back in by tomorrow.”
“I figured that was what was going on. I had Albright bring me to the door.”
Rines nodded. The Agency didn’t have much use for a fancy physical plant—a secure switchboard, storage for various electronic equipment, some filing cabinets and a comfortable chair for the Congressman to sit on and think, on those rare occasions he wasn’t sitting and thinking in his apartment or in his office on the Hill. The Agency parasited (the Congressman’s word) more than money from other government agencies. Computer time, background reports, satellite photographs, statistics. If anyone anywhere in the government knew something, the Congressman could get hold of the information without leaving a trace. If no one knew, and learning it was a matter of routine, he could have someone find out. Not the least of his resources was the staff of the Library of Congress, sort of a fringe benefit of his new cover.
Not having much to move, the Agency moved frequently. Granted, nobody in this particular building might check into the “fallout shelter” for another ten years, but why be there when they felt the urge to look if you owned another dozen buildings just like it in the Greater Washington area?
“What do you think of Albright?” Rines asked.
“Going to be a good one, I think. He’s tense because he doesn’t know what to make of me, and that makes him overcautious. And apprehensive, when I talk him out of it. If I were in his place, I’d be quietly checking out the building.”
“He is,” Rines assured him. “Electronic security is the last thing to be moved.”
“Yeah,” Trotter said. “I know how the old man works. Is he here?”
“Of course he is.” For a second it looked as if Rines was going to say something else—“he misses you,” Trotter thought absurdly—but he closed his mouth before anything got out.
“What should we do about Albright?” Rines asked.
“What the hell, he’s your man. Make up a story for him. Tell him the truth.”
“You sure you want him to know the truth?”
“If I decide I don’t like it, I can always kill him.”
Rines looked at him. “I never know when you’re kidding.”
“That’s right. I’m here to be briefed. Something about Cronus.”
“Yeah,” Rines said. “Let’s go talk to your father.”