“Because Helene will be here shortly with our dinner, and we don’t want to shock her and make her drop the dishes.”

“Oh, well,” Holly said, squeezing his genitals. “I’ll just have to wait.”

Dinner arrived, they sat down, and Fred decanted the wine Stone had chosen. They tucked in to their first course, Pâté Diana: goose liver with lots of butter.

“Okay, what advice do you need?” Stone asked.

“I have what you might call an administrative problem at State,” she said.

“And we both are aware that I know absolutely nothing about the administration of the State Department, so why are you talking to me about it?”

“Because I trust your judgment.”

“What judgment?”

“Judgment about everything.”

“Even things I know nothing about?” Stone took a sip of his wine. “The reason some people trust my judgment is because I never give advice about things I know nothing about.”

“Are you willing to listen?”

“Yes, of course. Shoot.”

“I have reason to believe that there is a Russian mole in a trusted position at State.”

Stone took a gulp of his wine and looked at her. She seemed absolutely serious.

2

Holly took a gulp of her wine, too. “All right, now you know. What’s your advice?”

“Shoot him between the eyes with a large-caliber weapon,” Stone replied.

“Be serious.”

“That’s as serious as I can be with grossly insufficient information. Try again.”

“My deputy secretary stopped by the house last night and insisted that we take a walk around the block, indicating with hand motions that there might be a bug in the house. So, we took a walk.” She paused to stuff some moussaka into her mouth.

Stone waited for her to chew. “Did you check that out?”

“This morning. My living room was bugged. My people fixed it.”

“And what did your deputy impart to you while you were hiking the streets of Georgetown?”

“That he believed there to be a mole in the department.”

“On what evidence? And don’t tell me a hunch.”

“He had a briefing from somebody at the Agency whose report on the Russian situation contained a telephone intercept that employed the exact language he had used at a staff meeting at State a week or so before.”

“Who else attended the staff meeting?”

“About thirty staffers.”

“How many state department staffers are there?

“A little over seventy-five thousand.”

“So, you need only investigate the thirty? That’s better than seventy-five thousand. Why didn’t you immediately call the FBI?”

“Are you nuts?”

“Isn’t that what they do? Counterintelligence?”

“They would flood the department with agents, knocking over things and looking into people’s desk drawers and interrogating my staff.”

“Don’t you think they know what they’re doing?”

“I do think they know what they’re doing, but they do it noisily, and I can’t afford that kind of noise right now. It would get into the media before sunset tomorrow.”