Rome, Italy
September 1987

Aldrich Ames turned onto the Via Veneto and drove two blocks to the U.S. Embassy and his office. The steel gray XJ-6 Jaguar purred quietly as he sat in the noonday traffic. Glancing at his Rolex, he noted that he was late again, but he really didn’t care.

He was mulling over a discussion he had had recently with his Russian handler. They were pressuring him now for more names, at a time when he thought he had named every Soviet agent he could think of who had ever worked for the CIA. They wanted more. Shifting gears clumsily—the alcohol didn’t help his concentration—he inched the car forward in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Then the name hit him. Fedorenko! He had not told them about Sergei Fedorenko, his friend from the time he had spent in the CIA’s field office in New York. He would give them Fedorenko.

He knew they would shoot his old friend, as surely as they had shot all the others. It was a sad piece of work, but he couldn’t turn back now.