Direct Action by John Weisman Page A

windows were all triple-paned glass with white sound running between the outside two panes, and the secure communications system, the classified computer network, and the unclass telephones were checked daily by technicians from one of the CIA Division of Security’s offices. If truth be told, the in-place TECHSEC 7 at C-PIG and the other counterterrorist-related offices that did business from the toadgreen glass box on Coppermine Road was newer and far more thorough than what was available at some of the older clandestine CIA satellite buildings that fanned out across a vast swath of Northern Virginia. Only at Coppermine, however, was the personnel’s security bar placed so high.
    Indeed, Mrs. ST. JOHN affected not only MJ’s work environment, but her social life. It was, in a word, constricted. Because of the new regs, Hester P. SUTCLIFFE, spinster, was pretty much confined to dating bachelors whose clearances were either equal to, or higher than, her own. That was a problem, too. Of course Hester (as she thought of herself five and sometimes six days a week) wasn’t actually dating these days. She was in mourning over a just-ended long-term relationship with Tom Stafford, a thirty-nineyear-old case officer who worked at the Counterterrorism Center as a troubleshooter. MJ’s brain corrected itself. Who used to work at CTC.
    She was trapped in an emotional maze. The relationship was over—but it wasn’t. They’d said it all—but there was a lot left to be said. And then there was the passion. Oh, the passion.
    Still, Tom was gone. That was a certainty. He’d quit CIA in January over some dumb flap—refused to elaborate other than to say the people for whom he worked were idiots and he couldn’t deal with the place anymore. By April, he’d moved to France and taken a job running the Paris office of the 4627 Company, which MJ understood to be a somewhat shadowy riskassessment and security consulting firm owned by a bunch of retired CIA supergrades. There was something fishy about it.
    Still, she couldn’t argue the money. Tom had resigned as a GS-15, step 5. He’d made just over $110,000 a year. The 4627 Company gave him a vice president’s title, a $250,000 salary—most of it tax-free—and a a250,000 signing bonus so he could buy an apartment in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. Moreover, he was returning to familiar turf. Tom had served at Paris station for almost four years in the mid-1990s and he’d always said he felt more at home in France than he ever did in Washington.
7 Technical security precautions.
    It had been an amiable, if heart-wrenching split. They still talked every three or four days. She’d visited him in Paris in August, staying for a week at his apartment at 17 rue Raynouard and loving every minute of it. She was, in fact, going to Paris tomorrow for a long weekend with him. The keys to rue Raynouard were already in her handbag.
    Tom would probably take her to some romantic, candlelit restaurant, buy her champagne, and ask her to come to Paris and move in with him. It had become his mantra. Every time they spoke, Tom pleaded his case.
    So far, she’d refused. There were two niggling problems. The first was rooted in her traditional Irish-Catholic upbringing. O’Connors did not quit their jobs and move to Paris to, well, shack up.
    When Tom told her she was taking an old-fashioned stance, her answer (in decent brogue) went: “What’s your point, laddie?”
Sure she was old-fashioned. Between the parental influence of Assistant Battalion Chief and Mrs. Michael John O’Connor (FDNY, retired) and sixteen years of parochial education, that’s how she felt. She was a modern practicing Catholic. She’d always maintained her one-bedroom condo in Rosslyn, even when she and Tom spent most of their time in his Reston town house. It gave her a sense of independence, of security. When—and if—they committed to marriage, she’d give it up.
But that hadn’t happened. And it stung.