“The way of the world,” he said. “This sad world.”

And then he left.

Now she could begin. The assignment was an obvious one—the most obvious one since her unit had been established.

The office had been set up by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had tired of the constant stream of problems created by past CIA employees. The former Agency accountant caught managing shady currency transactions for an African dictator. The onetime Soviet affairs analyst now advising a Russian mafia chief. The weapons dealer busted in Peshawar for selling missile parts to China—he had handled the CIA’s arms transfers to the mujhadeen in Afghanistan. Most of the “problem children,” as the director called them, were former paramilitary agents arrested on drug charges. They hired lawyers who politely noted that prosecution would lead to the disclosure of secrets certain to embarrass the U.S. government in general, and the Central Intelligence Agency in particular.

The director had become fed up with clearing the trash of his predecessors. He could not will away the crap. What was fucked, he once told Lancette, always remained fucked. But his motto was, stay ahead of the curve. And now, because of that, Julia Lancette was feeding digital imagery data into a computer.

A simple job—that’s how Director Timothy Wenner had described this posting to her. He had plucked her out of the East European division of the intelligence directorate, where she had become an unwanted woman. Lancette had refused to revise a report on the Balkans to reflect her supervisor’s bias in favor of a particular Serbian faction. In retaliation, the supervisor instigated a disciplinary action against her, claiming she had mishandled classified records. Rather than accept this punishment, she took the matter to the agency’s inspector general. The IG concluded that the supervisor had tried to cook the report. The supervisor was demoted, and Lancette was cleared. But none of this helped her career. The story leaked to the press, and she had to testify before the Senate intelligence committee in a secret session. After that, no branch chief would touch her. Three years out of graduate school, she was undone professionally. The word was out: not a team player.

But she had impressed Wenner, and he asked Lancette to create an office to monitor news reports and law enforcement cables in order to determine whether any scumbag-in-the-news had Agency connections. She accepted what for most CIA officers would be a nightmare assignment.