Fidelity by Jan Fedarcyk Page A

on more than one occasion. Once, many years earlier, before he had become firmly ensconced in the bosom of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, when his cover had been blown on some or other ploy in some or other country, the local security services had put out an all-points bulletin for a “bald man in a suit,” a sobriquet that Anthony still looked back on with some pride. Was this not the ultimate compliment for a CIA Case Officer? Faceless and unnoticeable, pulling strings without anyone ever being the wiser?
    The ideal, though—like most ideals—was rarely reached. Anthony looked at himself one last time in the mirror, studying the laugh lines around his eyes, deeply etched as a delineation of his character, although he could not have been accused of any excess of jocularity. Not so many more years at this, he told himself, a promise often repeated that would someday need to be followed through on. But not yet. He grabbed his briefcase and went to start the meeting he had been dreading for the better part of a month.
    The Associate Deputy Director of Operations was ten years older than Anthony, bumping close up against retirement and doing everything he could to hide it. His hair was the jet-black of a twenty-year-old, but if you were perceptive—and Mike Anthony was very perceptive—you could make out some gray amongst the roots. He wore a suit that was expensive, old-fashioned, out of style but still handsome. He sat at the boss end of a big wooden desk, and he had an unlit cigar in his mouth. Anthony wondered, as he did whenever he had to meet with the ADDO, if it was the same cigar or if he had a box of them in some drawer of the giant bureau, a dozen Churchills well chewed.
    â€œMike,” he said, gregarious and expansive as ever. “Have a seat, let’s talk through this thing.”
    â€œDirector,” Anthony said, nodding and accepting the seat.
    The meeting was an informal formality. Informal because the ADDO liked it that way: loose ties and first names. A formalitybecause they had only the one option set before them, and no conversation could get around that fact.
    â€œSounds like we got a little bit of a mess out there old Moscow way.”
    â€œI think that’s exactly what we have, sir,” Anthony answered.
    â€œTell me about it.”
    Which Anthony did then: a retread of what was in the report, all things that the ADDO already knew. Unhappy to do what needed doing, the ADDO would require an hour of cajoling, of pushing and prodding, although in the end he would follow the only course available to them. Resentfully, with some annoyance at the man doing the shoving.
    The ADDO did not particularly like Anthony and had made that clear over the years in any number of ways big and small. Anthony had never been quite sure why—some long-forgotten insult, or a simple clash of styles, perhaps. He did his best not to hold the ADDO’s antipathy against him. The two things that a lifetime working as a spy had taught Anthony—there were many things but the two main things—were an eye for human weakness, and sympathy towards it. People were not black or white, not good or evil, not one thing or another. They were many things; they were vices and virtues overlapping, sometimes so close that it was difficult to see where one left off and the other began. The ADDO had been a great man once—never an easy man, perhaps never a friendly one, but by the standards of their trade he had been a giant. Coming up through the ranks, Anthony had been weaned on the stories of the ADDO’s victories, snatched from the cold hands of his grim-eyed Soviet counterparts.
    Time passes. More and more the ADDO seemed out of sync with the development of the intelligence community, which, after the failures of 9/11, had increasingly stressed coordination andthe shared communication of information through the various government agencies tasked with defending the