State of Siege - Tom Clancy [47]
"I know."
"Just try not to destroy the Secretariat Building, okay?" Herbert said. "And one more thing." "What's that?" Rodgers asked. "I don't want to find myself running this goddamned place," Herbert said with the hint of a smile. "So make sure you get your headstrong, impatient, acting-out self back here." "I'll try," Rodgers said, smiling slightly himself as he opened the door.
It wasn't exactly the endorsement Rodgers had hoped for but, as he hurried through the cubicles toward the elevator, at least he didn't feel like Gary Cooper in High Noon-alone. And right now, that was something.
New York, New York Saturday, 10:11 r.m
The short-lived but legendary Office of Strategic Services was formed in June of 1942. Under the leadership of World War I hero William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS was responsible for collecting military intelligence. After the war, in 1946, President Truman established the Central Intelligence Group, which was chartered to gather foreign intelligence pertaining to national security. A year later, the National Security Act renamed the CIG the Central Intelligence Agency. The act also broadened the scope of the CIA charter to allow it to conduct counterintelligence activities.
Thirty-two-year-old Annabelle "Ani" Hampton had always enjoyed being a spy. There were so many mental and emotional levels to it, so many sensations. There was danger and there was reward proportionate to the danger. There was a sense of being invisible or, if you were caught, of being more naked than naked. There was a feeling of having power over others, of risking punishment and oath. There was also a great deal of planning involved, of positioning yourself just so, of patience, of catching someone in the right frame of mind, of seducing emotionally and sometimes physically.
It was, in fact, a lot like sex only better, she thought. In spying, if you grew tired of someone you could have them killed. Not that she ever had. Not yet, anyway.
Ani had enjoyed being a spy because she'd always been a loner. Other children had no curiosity. She did. As a child, she liked to find out where squirrels made their homes or watch birds as they laid their eggs or, depending on her mood, help wild rabbits escape from red foxes or help red foxes snare the hares. She liked to eavesdrop on her father's pinochle games or on her grandmother's teas or on her older brother's dates. She even made a journal of the news she picked up while spying on her family. Which neighbor was "a prick." Which aunt was "a bitch on wheels." Which mother-in-law "should learn to keep her mouth shut." Ani's mother once found the journal and took it away, but that was all right. Ani had been smart enough to keep a duplicate book.
Ani's parents, Also and Ginny, had owned a women's clothing store in Roanoke, Virginia. Ani used to work at Hampton's Fashions after school and on weekends. Whenever possible, she would study everything about the people who came in to browse. She attempted to hear what they were saying, tried to guess what they were going to look at based on how they were dressed or how well they spoke. And then she moved in to make the sale. If she'd been careful and smart, she got it. Usually, she was.
The spying ended when her parents's store went bankrupt, driven out of business by larger discount chains. Her parents were forced to go to work for one of those chains. But Ani's fascination with understanding and then carefully manipulating people did not die. She won a full scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington. She majored in political science and minored in Asian affairs since, at the time, it looked like Japan and the Pacific Rim were going to be the hot spots of the twenty-first century. Though her parents" own hopes had died, Ani never saw them prouder than when she graduated from college summa cum laude. That was when she set herself a goal to make them prouder still. Ani resolved that she would not only become a CIA agent, but before she was forty years old, she would be running the