world of bad guys and spies. As for Mary Pat, if ever a woman had been born to do intelligence work, it was her, the granddaughter of the riding tutor to Czar Nicholas II and the daughter of Colonel Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky, who in 1917 had seen the handwriting on the walls and slipped his family out of Russia just before the revolution that would topple the Romanov dynasty and cost the lives of Nicholas and his family.
“Hard day at the office, dear?” Mary Pat asked her husband.
“Grueling, absolutely grueling. So many big words, such a small dictionary.” He leaned in to give her a peck on the cheek. “And how are you?”
“Fine, fine.”
“Pondering again, are we? About you know who?”
Mary Pat nodded. “Got to go in tonight, in fact. Something hot in the pipeline, maybe. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Ed frowned, but Mary Pat couldn’t tell if it was because he missed the action or because he was as skeptical as she was. Terrorist groups were growing more intel-savvy by the day, especially after 9/11.
Mary Pat and Ed Foley had both earned the right to be slightly cynical if it suited them, having witnessed firsthand the CIA’s internal workings and convoluted history for nearly thirty years, and having served at Moscow Station as husband-and-wife case officers back when Russia was still ruling the Soviet Union and the KGB and its satellite agencies were the CIA’s only real bugaboo.
Both had risen through the ranks of Langley’s directorate of operations, Ed ending his career as DCI, or director central intelligence, while Mary Pat, once the deputy director for operations, had requested a sub-lateral transfer to the NCTC—the National Counterterrorism Center—to serve as its deputy director. As expected, the rumor mill had gone into overdrive, speculating that Mary Pat had in fact been demoted from her DDO post and that her position at the NCTC was merely a waypoint on the road to retirement. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The NCTC was the tip of the spear, and Mary Pat wanted to be there.
Of course, her decision had been helped by the fact that their old home, the DO, wasn’t what it used to be. Its new name, the Clandestine Service, while it grated on both of them (although neither was under the illusion that the term directorate of operations fooled anyone, Clandestine Service seemed just a tad too flashy for their tastes), they also knew it was just another moniker. Unfortunately, the change had come at roughly the same time they felt the directorate had become less about covert operations and intelligence gathering and more about politics. And while Mary Pat and Ed each had his and her own unique—and frequently contrary—political views, what they both agreed on was that politics and intelligence were a bad mix. Too damned many in the CIA’s upper echelons were simply civil servants looking for a ticket punch on their way to bigger and better things, something the Foleys had never fathomed. As far as they were concerned, there was no higher calling than to serve in defense of your country, whether in uniform on the battlefield or behind the curtain of what CIA Cold War spymaster James Jesus Angleton had dubbed the “Wilderness of Mirrors.” Never mind that Angleton had very likely been a delusional paranoid whose witch hunts for Soviet moles had eaten Langley from the inside out like so much cancer. As far as Mary Pat was concerned, Angleton’s nickname for the world of espionage was dead-on.
As much as she loved the world in which she worked, the “Wilderness” took its toll. Over the last few months, she and Ed had started chatting about her eventual retirement, and while her husband had been characteristically tactful (if not subtle), it was clear what he wanted her to do, going as far as leaving copies of National Geographic open on the kitchen table, turned to a picture of Fiji or a history piece on New Zealand, two places they’d put on their “someday” list.
In those rare moments when she allowed herself introspection about something other than work, Mary Pat had found herself dancing around the critical question—Why am I staying?—without really tackling it head-on. They had plenty of money to retire on, and neither would lack for things to keep them occupied. So if money wasn’t the issue, what was? It was simple really: Intel work was her calling, and she knew it—had known it from day one