An Honorable Man Read Free Page A

the obvious. The Soviets had penetrated the Agency. Someone inside had provided the Soviets with drop points, and then later, the names of CIA assets. Mueller saw the pattern in Vienna and continued to see it when he was brought back to agency headquarters in Quarter’s Eye. Men disappeared, networks rolled up. One by one CIA assets were compromised in Vienna, Berlin, and now there was Alfred Leisz. He hadn’t been somewhere in Europe. Leisz had been right there in Washington managing the listening post in the basement of the public library near the Soviet embassy.
    Traitor was a word that never appeared in memos; it was unsaid in meetings. But it was whispered at Friday-afternoon vespers when Scotch whiskey released the week’s tension among case officers who worked in Quarter’s Eye. Mueller too had been reluctant to use the word because it implied a betrayal of unthinkable proportions. Someone in the close group of colleagues was working for the other side. One of them had turned to the Soviet Union. Mueller knew trust was the basis of their work andhe had become guarded in his conversations, cautious in what he said, and matters he once openly discussed he avoided, or simply shut down. Mueller found himself among his colleagues with their Scotch whiskeys knowing they were thinking: Is he? Was he? Could he?
    Everyone privately worried about a Soviet agent in their midst. They worried about other things too, but those anxieties were openly discussed. A great emphasis, by way of defense, was placed upon loud opinions against communism, against homosexuality, against atheism. And this was matched by great enthusiasm for the activities in their lives, the quail hunting, fly-fishing, tennis, drinking. But not discussed, not among themselves or with their wives, who often were in the dark about what their husbands did, or even who their employer was, were their private suspicions about colleagues. Caution depleted camaraderie.
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    The call to meet the director came early in the morning. Dense fog rolled in from the cold Potomac and low visibility in the back of the taxi deepened Mueller’s gloomy mood. It reminded him of winter in Vienna. Dampness that penetrated the soul.
    Mueller was just shy of six feet, and on the thin side, which made him appear lanky, and he slumped in the backseat. His face was slightly oval, hair parted on the left, and combed straight back, and he wore clear plastic eyeglass that made him look inconspicuous, a man who could sit in a restaurant and not catch a waiter’s eye.
    He dressed practically, in gabardine suits that held their formone day to the next and let him keep his trips to the cleaners to a minimum. He used a simple knot for his necktie because it was fast, easy to tie, and quick to remove, and it matched the ­narrow-spread collar he preferred. His leather shoes needed a shine and their soles were wearing thin, but since his divorce he hadn’t found a comfortable rhythm to his personal life.
    He had long, delicate fingers with nails that almost looked manicured. His were not hands that could strangle a man. They lacked the strength for that. The grip of a tennis racket had helped, but tennis was the sport he took up only when he wasn’t near a boathouse with sculls to put in the river. They were the hands of a man with a desk job, hands of a thinker. A callus on his finger came from after-action reports he wrote in a cramped style with fountain pen. No one would look at Mueller and think he was the type to pick a fight in a bar.
    â€œOn the right,” Mueller said. He leaned forward to the driver and cocked his head at an angle that was always the same degree off center when he took an interest in the person he was addressing. “Drop me there at the guardhouse.”
    Mueller flashed his badge to the military policeman at the locked gate, near the sign that identified the redbrick building as the