To hell with it, Stantington thought. Time magazine would have to think of some other lead for its story. He couldn't be expected to do everybody's job for them.

The admiral was in his office at 9 A.M. He called his secretary on the intercom and told her to get a locksmith tout de suite and get a new lock for his bathroom door.

"And get two keys," he said. "And you keep one."

"Yes, sir," the young woman said, slightly surprised, because she hadn't thought it took a CIA command decision to get two keys for a new lock.

When he clicked off his intercom, Stantington checked his pedometer and found that he had already walked one and a half miles of his ten-mile daily quota. It gave him his first warm feeling of the day.

The second warm feeling came twenty minutes later when he met with his director of operations and chief of personnel and signed an order terminating the employment of 250 field agents and, thus, with a stroke of the pen, accomplishing the kind of decimation of the CIA's field forces that

5

the Russians had lusted after for years but had always been unable to accomplish.

"Have to show them up on the Hill that we mean business," the CIA director said. "Anything else?"

He looked at the two men. His chief of operations, a round man who sweated a lot and had yellow teeth, said "Here's something you'll like, Admiral. It's called Project Omega and it's ours."

"I've never heard of it. What's its function?"

"That's just it. It doesn't have any function. The biggest damned no-show job I've ever seen." The operations director spoke in a crackly Southern accent. He was a lifelong friend of Stantington's and had formerly headed the highway system of a Southern state. He got the CIA job, out-of a large group of other close political friends, because he was the only one who had never been indicted for taking construction kickbacks.