He went through the pictures again in his mind, then suddenly spun away from the view of the darkness and the stars, and pushed a button on a metal panel set into the space where the desk ordinarily would have had a top drawer.

"Yes?" came a voice.

"Tell programming to give me a match on background attached to the pictures. Have the computer do it. I don't want anyone playing games. I'm the only one to see the matchups."

"Yes sir."

"I might add that if I hear of any of those pictures being used for entertainment, heads will roll. Yours in particular."

"Yes sir."

In fourteen minutes and thirty seconds at the click of the chronograph stopwatch, the pictures in numbered envelopes arrived attached to resumes in numbered envelopes.

"Leave," said the bitter-faced man, checking the number on the envelope containing a photograph of a pudgy, middle-aged man wearing a black cape and busy stroking away at a wild-eyed, dark-haired woman wearing only long stockings and boots.

He looked at the resume. "Yes, I thought so. He's a goddam homosexual. Dammit." He put the resume back in the envelope and the pictures back in their envelopes and sealed them all. Then he spun back to the darkness of Long Island Sound.

A dead operative. Trouble at Brewster Forum. Photo of a homosexual male playing with an obviously naked woman.

Yes or no, he thought. Remo Williams. The Destroyer. Yes or no. The decision was his to make, the responsibility his to bear.

He thought once more of Peter McCarthy who had worked for the past eight years for a federal agency he did not even know existed. And now he was dead. His family would carry forever the shame of a man who died from a self-inflicted overdose of narcotics. McCarthy's country-men would never know that he had died for duty. No one would ever care. Should a man be allowed to die that gracelessly?

Back to the desk. Press the commissary button.