The Last Spymaster Read Free

minutes past morning call at the crowded federal penitentiary in the Susquehanna Valley, a stranger in civilian clothes marched down a gray cellblock, staring straight ahead. A Bureau of Prisons lieutenant led; two guards followed. All looked uneasy.
    The man paused at a cell. As soon as the door opened, he moved insideand glared down at the solitary cot. The blanket had been yanked aside to reveal blue prison trousers and shirt stuffed with crumpled newspapers and arranged to mimic a man lying on his side. There was also a fake wood arm covered with flesh-colored upholstery from the prison factory. With the pillow pounded high as if it covered a head, and the blanket on top exposing part of the arm, not even the obligatory flash of a guard’s light during nighttime checks would reveal that no one slept there.
    “Clever bastard.” The stranger jerked a cell phone from his pocket. He punched in a number and kept his voice low: “He’s gone, all right. I’m in his cell now. I’ll—”
    “Seal it off,” the voice on the other end of the line ordered. “No one’s to search it, understand? And for God’s sake, make sure no one tells the press that Jay Tice has escaped!”
     
    Langley, Virginia
     
    At 9:06 A.M. Laurence Litchfield, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations—the DDO—hand-carried a sealed white envelope down from the seventh floor to the Staff Operations Center, the SOC, which was responsible for case-management support to colleagues in the field. In his mid-forties, Litchfield was lean, with a runner’s wiry body and a lanky gait. His eyes were carved deep into his face. Above them, wide brows formed an ink-black line across his forehead.
    The SOC chief looked up from her desk. “Good morning, Mr. Litchfield. We got some overnight requests from our people in Yemen and Qatar. I was going to memo you about our progress with the intelligence summit, but I can fill you in now.”
    “First I need to talk to one of your people—Elaine Cunningham.”
    She noted the envelope in his hand. “Cunningham? You know she’s sidelined.”
    “I know. Show me where she is.”
    She nodded and led him out the door and down two long corridors and into a room crammed with gray modular cubicles, which someonelong ago had cynically dubbed the Parking Lot. Here a glacially changing landscape of some three dozen field officers waited like used cars collecting dust, futures uncertain. Their covers had been irrevocably blown, or they had proved inept, or they had run into Langley politics. For many, the next stop was the tedium of personnel or recruitment or curriculum—or, worst case, dismissal.
    The chief pointed out Cunningham’s cubicle among the maze, and Litchfield thanked her. “Go up to my office. I’ll meet you there.”
    She left, and he turned down the narrow aisle and found Elaine Cunningham in her cramped enclosure, marching back and forth beside her desk, arms crossed, her shoulder propping her phone against her ear as she talked quietly into it. She was a small woman, twenty-nine years old and blond, dressed in an unbuttoned black jacket, white T-shirt, and belted black pants.
    As he leaned against the frame of her cubicle to study her, she glanced up and recognized him. She winked one large blue eye in greeting.
    And continued talking into the phone: “So, your missing source is a broker in Brussels. He’s a morose Dane, unmarried, follows soccer. He didn’t show up for a blind date yesterday and missed the alternate meet this morning. Now you have word he’s in the wind, and Copenhagen can’t find him.” She pursed her lips. Her pace quickened. “All Scandinavians tend to be stereotyped as morose, but there are real national differences. It’s the Swedes who are mostly angst-ridden, while the Danes are more happy-go-lucky. So your morose Dane may actually be Swedish, and if he’s driving home, he probably didn’t stop in Copenhagen but took the Øresund Fixed Link across the sound into