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By Root 818 0

God rest his soul. He’d been away when Maxwell had checked out at eighty-three—he’d been in Iran, of all places, trying to see if a network of agents had been completely rolled up by Iranian security. That process had begun, but John had managed to get five of them out of the country alive, via the UAE, along with their families. Sonny Maxwell was still flying, a senior captain for Delta, father of four. The medal was for getting Sonny out of North Vietnam. It now seemed like something that had happened during the last ice age. But he had this little ribbon to show for it, and that beat a kick in the balls. Somewhere packed away were the mess jacket and black shoes of a chief bosun’s mate, along with the gold Budweiser badge of a Navy SEAL. In most Navy NCO clubs he wouldn’t have been allowed to buy his own beers, but Jesus, today the chiefs looked so damned young. Once they’d seemed like Noah himself.

But the good news was that he wasn’t dead yet. And he could look forward to honorable retirement, and maybe doing that autobiography, if Langley ever let him publish it. Not very likely. He knew a lot of things that ought not to be known, and he’d done one or two things that probably ought not to have been done, though at the time his life had ridden on that particular horse. Things like that didn’t always make sense to the people who sat at desks in the Old Headquarters Building, but for them the big part of the day was finding a good parking place and whether or not the cafeteria had spice cake on the dessert stack.

He could see Washington, D.C., out the window. The Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and George’s marble obelisk, plus the surpassingly ugly buildings that housed various government departments.

To John Terrence Clark it was just a whole city composed of headquarters pukes for whom reality was a file folder in which the papers were supposed to be properly filled out, and if a man had to shed blood to make it that way, well, that was a matter of only distant interest. Hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them had wives—or husbands—and kids, but even so it was hard not to regard them with distaste—and, on occasion, with outright hatred. But they had their world, and he had his. They might overlap, but they never really met.

“Glad to be back, John?” Sandy asked.

“Yeah, sorta.” Change was hard but inevitable. As far as where his life would go from here … time would tell.

The next morning Clark turned right off the George Washington Parkway, looping to the left and through the gatehouse, whose armed guard had his tag number on his list of “okay to admit” strangers. John was allowed to park in the visitors’ area just in front and to the left of the big canopy.

“So how long before they tell us to find new employment, John?” Domingo asked.

“I give it maybe forty minutes. They’ll be polite about it, I’m sure.”

And with that assessment, they exited his rented Chevy and walked to the front door, there to be met by an SPO, or security and protective officer, whom they didn’t know.

“Mr. Clark, Mr. Chavez. I’m Pete Simmons. Welcome home.”

“Good to be back,” John responded. “You are … ?”

“I’m an SPO, waiting for a field assignment. Got out of The Farm two months ago.”

“Who was your training officer?”

“Max DuPont.”

“Max hasn’t retired yet? Good man.”

“Good teacher. He told us a few stories about you two, and we saw the training film you did back in ’02.”

“I remember that,” Chavez observed. “Shaken, not stirred.” He had himself a brief laugh.

“I don’t drink martinis, Domingo, remember?”

“Not as good-looking as Sean Connery, either. What did you learn from the film, Simmons?”

“Keep your options open, and don’t walk in the middle of the street.” Those were, in fact, two good lessons for a field spook.

“So who’re we meeting?” Clark asked.

“Assistant Deputy Director Charles Sumner Alden, ADDO.”

“Political appointment?”

“Correct. Kennedy School, Harvard, yeah. He’s friendly enough, but sometimes I wonder if he really approves of what we do here.”

“I wonder what Ed and Mary Pat are doing now.”