He handed me the phone and rubbed his ear. To Tran he said, somewhere between impressed and annoyed, "This guy's CIA. That was the assistant to the Director." Then, to me, "She wants a word with you."

Shit. I took the phone from Enders and stared at it, while I toyed with the idea of just punching off.

The lady on the other end, Ms. Phyllis Carney, was my presumptive boss, an elderly lady with the looks and bearing of a fairy-tale grandmother and the avuncular temperament of the Big Bad Wolf. About eighty, and thus long past mandatory retirement, which showed she was either irreplaceable at her job, or she knows the apartment number where the chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Subcommittee keeps his mistress. Probably both-Phyllis doesn't like loose ends.

Her official title is Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence, an amorphous designation, which seems to suit her fine. I had been working for her for six months and had yet to figure out exactly what she does, or who she is. You feel you know her, and on the surface you do. At the same time, something about her is chronically elusive, a maddening mystique, as our writer friends might say. But partly her job is to cover her boss's butt, a Sisyphean task in a democratic land such as ours, where the head spook is always distrusted by the President, despised by the press, pilloried by the left, demonized by the right, and at any given moment is the object of no less than thirty ongoing congressional investigations and inquiries.

It said something about Phyllis that her boss chose her for this punishing and thankless task. It said something more that she accepted it when her high school classmates were either six feet under or dodging skin cancer and hurricanes in America's elephant dying grounds.