Separation of Power

This was the way the last ten-plus hours had gone. He'd bounced back and forth between the crisis with Freidman and his disintegrating relationship with A

As far as Rielly was concerned he saw little hope. He could not tell her what was going on. He couldn't even get into the details of his past with Donatella. Yes, they had been lovers, but that was over. He did not care who Rielly had slept with before they met. He trusted her, and it hurt that it wasn't mutual. It hurt that she didn't understand the complexities of his life. He wasn't walking away from an accounting job after a decade. In his line of work you didn't just simply hand in your two week notice and spend your remaining days hanging out in the break room and taking long lunches. In his world there were no coffee breaks, no long lunches, hell, he didn't even have a desk to clean out. It was a dirty, thankless profession and Rapp knew it sounded trite, but somebody sure as hell had to do it. He was trying his best to get out, and it was all for the sake of his future with A

He was angry at her for not appreciating his sacrifices. He'd killed for his country, he'd bled for his country and they hit one little bump in the road and she was gone. He'd even killed for her once, but he wasn't about to hold that over her head. He would never stoop so low. She either loved him, or she didn't. And right now it looked like she didn't. Rapp didn't know a lot about love, but he knew a lot about commitment and loyalty, and in his mind one of the worst things you could do is run away from your partner. People who really love each other stay and work it out. They don't run. Not Rielly, though, she didn't even give him the chance to explain.

He kept telling himself to withhold judgment on Rielly until he had some time to calm down, but he couldn't help it. The more he thought about her storming out of their hotel room the more it angered him. He had to ask himself if that was the type of woman he wanted to be married to and it scared him that he didn't know the answer. He loved her so much it hurt. It pained him that they were so close to having their life together and then, wham, their whole dream was derailed by one bizarre night in Milan.

Rapp was not good at grays. He liked black and white. Gray made for indecision, and indecision in his line of work was what got you killed. The plane was now floating just above the runway. He was almost home on American soil. The wheels gently touched down and Rapp decided on a plan of action. Rielly would have to wait. He wanted out, but he couldn't just abandon Ke

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

Andrews Air Force base, Friday morning

Irene Ke

There was a 7:00 a. m. meeting at the Pentagon, and Ke

It was human nature to think that only other people had problems. Many parents were slow to believe that their little darling could be causing trouble in school. Other people's children did that. The intelligence community worked the same way. When the navy was caught with a spy in their midst, the air force, the army, the CIA, the FBI, and everybody else pretty much shook their heads and said, "they blew it." Well, Ke

Stansfield had been a big man. He knew how to stay above the petty everyday dealings of Washington. He used to say that ninety-nine percent of the talk in Washington was utterly worthless. To him the key was to take nothing personally and remember the old axiom: whatever goes around comes around. Well, he couldn't have been more prophetic when it came to the Ames case. It was no secret that the FBI and the CIA did not always get along. During the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties the battles were legendary, and the Ames case only deepened the divide. The FBI adopted a very overt smugness toward the CIA. With Ames, the FBI gloated over how talented they were and how inept the CIA was. Stansfield had said to Ke

Stansfield had been right, and almost seven years after the Ames case the CIA returned the favor to the FBI when an agent in Moscow told his CIA controller about an FBI special agent named Robert Hanssen. It was the FBI's turn to suffer the humiliation of a traitor in their midst.

All of this was a reminder to her to be cautious. Ke

The previous night's sleep had been restless. Ke