Azrael Read Online Free PDF Page B

government contractors (Washington, D.C, being the nation’s ultimate one-industry town, Detroit notwithstanding) and companies that sold office furniture and stationery to government contractors. This particular building, Trotter learned from the directory, also housed a couple of low-budget lobbying groups (like the National Wooden Utensil Foundation) and the Greek-American Information Service, one of the dozens of special-interest journalistic enterprises that swarmed about the area.
    The Agency was not in the directory. Trotter was willing to bet, however, that the Agency owned the building.
    The Agency’s budget did not appear in that mound of telephone-directory-sized volumes the President submits to Congress every year. The Agency was not supposed to exist. It got its money in two ways—nickel-and-diming the budgets of dozens of different government departments, programs and agencies (Trotter’s father called this “spillage”); and from investments. Anonymous little office buildings in Silver Spring, for instance, and maybe one or more of the burger and chicken places across the street. No big earners, nothing to grab attention, but steady. And a lot of them. By the time Trotter had stopped working full-time for his old man, the Agency had been a whisker away from being self-supporting; by now, it was probably showing a profit.
    It had taken a certain amount of insistence to get Albright to drop him off here, once he’d seen the place. He couldn’t believe that the Bureau, with all the space it could want over at Justice, would waste its time with a building like this. He finally faced the fact that this was indeed the address he’d been given, with suitable authorization codes, over the phone, and let Trotter go without further fuss.
    The FBI had the huge establishment, marble pillars to lean on and everything. The Agency, on the other hand, traveled light, without a building, recognition, or even a name to its name.
    It was just the Agency, founded after World War II by an OSS general who knew that there were going to be times when a Central Intelligence Agency would be too big, too procedure-bound, and too scrupulous to do what had to be done. He fought for, and got, a hyper-secret organization with no official jurisdiction and, therefore, no limits on what it could concern itself with. There would be no chain of command—each Agent would answer solely to him, and he only to the President.
    That cozy setup lasted until Watergate. The press got a taste for blood, and the “National Interest” had been invoked so many times to cover embarrassing petty political bullshit that nobody would listen to it anymore. Congress was going to take a hand; Congress was going to oversee all American intelligence operations, and the President might not have the juice to resist.
    So the General became the Congressman. He found a district in his home state and persuaded the good old boys of the local Democratic Committee to nominate him (he was a War Hero, after all) in a place where, once the nomination was in hand, the election was an afterthought.
    Then he pulled strings until Washington looked like a spider-web, only nobody could find the spider. When it was over, the Congressman was the chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee. He did a hell of a job, too. Every spy outfit anyone had ever heard of had to admit that the Congressman was tough but fair. And the one nobody had ever heard of continued to operate as it always had.
    Trotter followed the fallout-shelter signs, the ones that had been put up in the early sixties when, if people looked up, it was even money whether they were checking for rain or for Russian ICBMs. Nobody’d needed the shelters (they were inadequate from the start, anyway), and nobody checked on them or maintained them, but nobody ever got around to taking the signs down, either. They’d become invisible, unless you looked for them.
    Trotter looked at them now, yellow-and-black