—

Mike Andrews was sitting in the room he used as an office when he worked at home, usually late at night, when it was quiet and he had time to catch up. He was a senior supervising operative in the CIA, and head of a local office of the DO, the Directorate of Operations, which functioned primarily abroad with “foreign assets in the field” dealing with clandestine intelligence, terrorism, and weapons. His office worked in conjunction with JFK Airport when needed. He had been in the navy, in military intelligence for eight years after college, then went on to Langley, in Virginia, to be trained for the CIA. At forty-nine, he had been in the Central Intelligence Agency for nineteen years. His office was in an innocuous-looking building in Manhattan that was a rebuilt warehouse on East Seventeenth Street, and he had a fully secure computer set up at home, for when he worked there, so he could easily access any information he needed.

He lived for his work and had no other life. His apartment looked like an office, with bare walls, and a minimum of secondhand furniture. It suited his bachelor existence. Like many top CIA agents, he had the perfect profile: married to his job, no personal attachments, no family other than one sister, no encumbrances. He had done undercover work in Central and South America for his first ten years with the CIA, and then settled down at home, in a spare bachelor pad in the Bowery. He was available 24/7 and didn’t mind being called at any hour. Rafe apologized as soon as Mike picked up.

“No worries, I’m still working. What can I do for you?” Mike said easily despite the late hour.

“I think we’re okay,” Rafe said, sounding uncertain. “We got a call from head of security at CDG in Paris. They got a flag on the computer on a first-class passenger. They’re nervous now, since we’ve started sending flights back. They’re being more careful. It sounds like this guy is some kind of businessman, maybe with some dubious connections. Russians. One of them may tie in to the SVR in Russia. They seem to be growing a lot of spies in Russia these days. There’s nothing else remarkable in the report about him, nothing with Interpol, no directive that he can’t enter the U.S. I just want to be sure I don’t make a mistake, and we wind up turning back the flight when they get to JFK, if we don’t have to.”