The prisoner looked up at Stantington and his eyes narrowed behind the thick-lensed glasses.

"A little cooperation?" he said. "A little cooperation? You've got thirty-five years of my cooperation and what did I get for it? A jail sentence." He turned his face away and crossed his arms stubbornly, covering the printed number on his chest. He wore twill prisoner's fatigues.

Stantington walked around him again until he was in front of the prisoner and the man could see the new CIA director's winning smile.

"That's all water under the bridge," Stantington said. "Come on. Why don't you just tell me where it is?"

2

"Go to hell. You and that peckerhead you work for."

"Dammit, man. I want that key."

"Will you please tell me why a forty-nine-cent key is so important to you ?" the prisoner asked.

"Because it is," Stantington said. He, wanted to grab the man by the throat and wring the truth out of him. Or call in a CIA goon squad and have them apply electrodes to his testicles and shock the answer out of him. But there was no more of that. That was the old CIA, the discredited CIA, and it was probably knowing that the CIA had changed that made this prisoner so truculent and unreasonable.

"I threw it in a sewer so you couldn't get your manicured hands on it," the prisoner said. "No. No, I didn't. I had a hundred copies made and I gave them away to everybody and when you're not looking they're going to sneak into your office and go into your private bathroom and piss in your sink."

Admiral Wingate Stantington took a deep breath and clenched his hands behind his back.

"If that's the way you want it," he said to the prisoner. "But I just want you to know I won't forget this. If I have anything to say about it, you can kiss your pension goodbye. If I have anything to say about it, you'll serve out every goddamn last day of your term. And if I have anything to say about it, people like you will never again have anything to do with this country's intelligence apparatus."