After a deep pull off the cigarette, Rapp casually looked out from under the rain-soaked umbrella and across the street. The target was sitting in one of the restaurant’s big windows sharing a meal, a lot of booze, and too much conversation with a man Rapp had never met, and hoped to keep that way. The other man was a concern, to be sure, but Rapp was not in the habit of killing private citizens simply because they were witnesses to the ramblings of a bitter man who was past his prime.

Despite every effort to find a different solution, Rapp’s mood was decidedly fatalistic. The surveillance team had the restaurant wired for sound, and for the last two hours he had been sitting in a parked Lincoln Town Car listening to his coworker trash-talk the Agency. As Rapp watched him take a drink of wine, he wasn’t sure what bothered him more, the man’s self-serving criticism, or his reckless behavior. One would think that anyone who worked at the CIA would be a little more careful about when and where he decided to commit treason.

So far his associate had done little more than espouse his political and philosophical views. Bad form, to be sure, but nothing that had risen to the level of outright sedition. Rapp, however, could sense that it was coming. The man had been drinking heavily. He’d downed two gin martinis and four glasses of red wine, and that wasn’t counting the bump or two he’d probably had on the flight up from D.C. and possibly at the hotel bar. Rapp had ordered his surveillance people to steer clear of the airports. There were too many cameras and trained law enforcement types who would eventually be interviewed by the FBI. If the night went the way it was looking, every moment of this guy’s life would be rewound and scrutinized, and they’d start with that U.S. Airways commuter flight he’d taken out of Reagan National up to LaGuardia earlier in the day.