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seemed to be. But she wasn't. It was agreed wholeheartedly. Fire them. Toss them overboard.

At 10 A.M., the six Project Omega agents were notified that they were separated from the service as of that minute.

None of them complained. None of them knew what he was supposed to be doing anyway.

Admiral Wingate Stantington continued to pace around his room when the two men left. He was composing a new lead for the Time cover story.

Between 9 and 9:20 A.M. last Tuesday morning, Admiral Wingate Stantington, the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, fired 256 agents, saving America's taxpayers almost ten million dollars. It was just the start of a good day's work.

Not bad, Stantington thought. He smiled. It was just the start of a good day's work.

In a small frame house just off Paces Ferry Road on the outskirts of Atlanta, Mrs. Amelia Sinkings stood at her kitchen sink, peeling apples with stiff arthritic fingers. She glanced at the clock over the sink. It was 10:54 A.M. Her telephone call would come in a minute. They came at different times each morning and she had a plastic laminated chart that told her what time to expect the call on each day. But after twenty years of getting the telephone calls, she had the chart memorized, so she'd put it in the closet under her good dishes. Ten fifty-five A.M. That's when the

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call would come. There was no question about it, so she turned off the faucet and dried her hands on the ironed cotton towel she kept on a rack over the sink. She walked slowly over to the kitchen table and sat there, waiting for the phone to ring.