King did something unexpected: closed his eyes and breathed deeply several times. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and defeated. “Nothing,” he said, and went back to his office. Betsy did not dare to sneak a glance at him until several minutes later. He had opened the tasking envelope from Millikan and was poring over it, apparently intending to handle the job himself rather than passing it on to one of his subordinates.
Betsy informed her officemates that she would be in the library and retreated to the third floor. It was a pathetic excuse for a library, but it worked nicely as a place where analysts could get away from their bosses. She had brought some blank paper along, which she used to write out an account of the day’s occurrences, using the Cross ballpoint pen her parents had given her as a high-school graduation present. When she thought it seemed good enough, she went up to the fourth floor and handed it to Spector’s secretary, saying, “He wanted this.”
The secretary—an old Agency hand—said, “I know, dear.” She handed Betsy an interoffice envelope. “The courier just brought this to you from the DCI’s office.”
Betsy accepted it, her gaze going immediately to the “Eyes Only” stamp. “Thanks.”
She went back to the library. The seventh floor was still a little too emotionally charged. She opened the envelope to find a set of marching orders with her name on them. “The White House wants your views on Iraqi misuse of USG funds. Be prepared to make an oral report on the sixteenth. In order to be prepared for this assignment, you are now seconded to the DCI’s personal staff 04/13/90 to 04/20/90. You will do no further work in the Castleman Building until your return on 04/21/90.”
By now it was half-past noon. She ventured back to the seventh floor, knowing that King would be gone to lunch. A few minutes after she arrived, Spector cruised in. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? The next week is going to be pretty intense. King knows about your new orders.” He looked about the vault. The other analysts shoved their faces into the screens of their workstations as if they hadn’t been listening. Spector took one hand out of his pocket and beckoned to her. “Come this way.”
Betsy stood up and followed him into King’s office. He shut the door and walked slowly around the office, looking at King’s stuff appraisingly. “None of what you do is to come back to this building,” he said. “When you return, you’ll go back to monitoring Southwest Asian Commodities. King won’t be here.”
“Pardon me?”
“We’ve floated him an administrative editorial excellence award. He’ll be promoted to a fifteen and assigned to run the Collections Office in Mobile, Alabama.”
Collections officers were the CIA’s ears to the ground. Their basic function was to pay uninvited visits on people who had recently been abroad and ask them if they’d seen anything interesting.
Betsy could not hide her amazement. Spector said, “You’ve been here long enough. We can fire analysts. We can’t fire managers. And you know why. So don’t ask.”
“See you in a week, then,” Betsy said. She was already trying to think of what she’d do with a free spring afternoon.
“Be careful. You’ll be swimming with the sharks now.”
The notion that she would never see Howard King again, never have to worry about him again, had left her so elated that she hardly heard Spector’s words. But she noticed Spector looking at her intently. “Thanks for the warning,” she said. “Can I call you for help?”
Spector, unexpectedly, reddened. “You can call me for advice.”
The next morning she took the Blue Bird bus from its stop outside the Rosslyn Metro out to Langley. The orders had said she was on the DCI’s personal staff for the week, but that was a sort of marriage of convenience, existing only on paper. They assigned her a windowless nook, far away from the office of the DCI or of anyone else important, and they left her completely alone. No one ever came by. That didn’t mean that someone wasn’t checking up on her; every time she logged on to her workstation, every time she punched a key on the keyboard, a record went into a file somewhere, and the DCI, or Spector, or whatever important person was responsible for putting her into this nook for the week, could get a very clear picture of how and what she was doing simply by pulling up that file.
The same Somebody had also temporarily upgraded her access privileges, and so, with the exception of nuclear-related and undersea-warfare compartments, she had virtually free run of all the information she could ever want.