"Go piss up a rope," the prisoner said.

Stantington walked briskly toward the door of

3

the bare room. His pedometer, which measured how many miles he walked each day, clicked against his right hip. At the door, the prisoner called his name. Stantington turned around and looked back into his eyes.

"It's going to happen to you too, Stantington," the man said. "Even as dumb as you are, you're going to try to do your best and one day they'll change the rules in the middle of the game and your ass'll be grass, just like mine. I'll save you a spot in the prison chow line."

And the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency smiled at Stantington, who walked out of the room without comment, a deep sense of disquiet and irritation flooding his mind.

Admiral Wingate Stantington brooded in the back of his limousine, all the way back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just a few miles from Washington, D.C. He had wanted that key to the private bathroom in his office. Time magazine was coming the next week, probably to do a cover story on him, and he had already written the lead of the story in his mind:

Admiral Wingate Stantington, the man chosen to lead the beleagured Central Intelligence Agency, is both brilliant and budget-minded. In case anyone doubts that last point, when Stantington was installed in his new office last week, he found the door to his private washroom locked. The only key, he was told, was in the possession of the former director of the CIA, now serving a five-year jail term. Rather than call a locksmith and

4

put in a new lock ($23.65 by current Washington prices), Admiral Stantington drove by the prison on his way to work the next day and got the key from his predecessor. 'That's the way we're running things around here from now on,' Stantington said when he reluctantly confirmed the story. 'A tight ship is one that doesn't leak and that includes not leaking money,' he said."