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of the Islamic world is plotting atrocities and making them happen.”
    â€œCan the agency be reformed?” Greta asked.
    â€œCertainly. Reorganized and refocused. Yet I don’t think it will ever be as good as the KGB was. I think the American people and the politicians will lose interest in the war on terrorism—hell, you read the newspapers—and those are the consumers the agency serves. Frankly, the politicians don’t want to pay people to hunt for bad news and they don’t want to hear it when it’s found.”
    â€œJack, you’re a terrible cynic,” Greta remarked, and winked at her host. “But what about the FBI? Nineteen suicidal saboteurs running around the country with no one the wiser—J. Edgar Hoover must be pounding the lid of his coffin.”
    â€œI’ll bet he is,” Jake muttered.
    The conversation had moved on to other subjects when Amy came to the door and announced, “Pie and ice cream.”
    Richard Doyle lived in a middle-sized, middle-class, three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house with a two-car garage in the endless suburbs of Virginia. His house sat tucked between two very similar houses on a quiet, tree-lined curvy street in a subdivision full of curvy streets and speed
bumps, a subdivision indistinguishable from a hundred others sprawled across the landscape west of the Potomac.
    The Doyles had an above-ground pool in their backyard. They purchased it years ago for the kids when they were small, but now that they were in high school the kids wanted to go to the community pool in the summer to hang with friends, so the Doyles’ pool was empty. Indeed, it had not contained water for several years.
    Martha Doyle sold real estate from a nearby mall office of a national chain. She drove a late-model white Lexus, which she used to haul clients around to look at houses. The expenses on the car were a nice tax write-off. Many of the people looking for houses were government employees, like her husband, or worked for civil or defense contractors or consulting firms that did business with the government. Some worked in the high-tech industries west of the Beltway.
    All in all, Martha Doyle was in a great place to sell real estate. Few people in the area owned a house more than three or four years; the constant turnover kept the market hot, hot, hot. She worked out at a racquet club and belonged to a variety of civic groups, which she had joined when she realized that the contacts she made there would bring her listings.
    The Doyles also belonged to a church. They attended services several times a month and participated in church events. Whether the motive was listings for Mrs. Doyle or because the Doyles enjoyed belonging to a religious community, no one could say.
    Richard Doyle worked for the CIA, although none of his neighbors knew it, not even his pastor. His wife knew, of course, yet never mentioned it. Both the Doyles told anyone who asked that he worked for “the government” and let it go at that. Anyone who pressed the issue was told he worked for the General Services Administration, a vast, unglamorous bureaucracy that maintained federal office buildings.
    There was little to distinguish the Doyles from the tens
of thousands of people who lived in similar houses and similar subdivisions in every direction, except for one astounding fact: Richard Doyle was a spy.
    None of his friends or neighbors knew his fantastic secret, not even his wife. He had been passing CIA secrets to the KGB, now the SVR, for fifteen years. He was paid for his treason, yet he didn’t do it for money—indeed, he had never spent a dollar that the Russians had paid him. He had it hidden away in safety-deposit boxes scattered through the Washington metropolitan area.
    Richard Doyle committed treason because it made him different from all these other middle-class schmucks slogging it eight-to-five, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, waiting