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throughout the U. S.” and no doubt had read them all, at one time or another.
    A fire crackled in the fireplace, illuminating the room with a cozy ocher light. We sat in worn leather armchairs before the flames. He sipped a 1963 vintage port of which he was especially proud; I had a single-malt.
    I appreciated the atmosphere Moore had so carefully arranged for himself. In his town house we were no longer in Georgetown in the 1990s, crammed with video rental places, Tan-O-Ramas, and Benettons, but in Edwardian England. Edmund Moore was a midwesterner, really an Oklahoman, but over his years with CIA he’d become as tweedy and Ivy League as any Yalie or Princetonian in his generation. It wasn’t an affectation; that was simply what happened after enough time in an organization like the CIA. In fact, the Agency had changed around him.
    During the sixties, when Ivy League campuses were torn by strikes and drugs, the Agency began to recruit from safer, midwestern schools of more fundamental values. Thus, as one Company friend put it, the “polyesterization” of the CIA. And here was this quaint Oklahoman who could have walked into a lecture room at Linsley Chittenden Hall at Yale in the forties and no one would have batted an eye. “Gentility,” Moore once told me, “is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.” In fact, though, Moore had married into a lot of money—Elena’s grandfather had invented something essential having to do with the telephone.
    “You don’t miss it at all, do you?” he asked with a mischievous smile.
    He was a small, almost pixie like man in his late seventies, with a small dome-shaped bald head and heavy black-framed glasses that magnified his eyes enormously. His brown tweed suit hung on him, making him seem even more diminutive. “The glamour, the travel, the firstclass hotels … “… The beautiful women,” I added helpfully, “and the Michelin three-star restaurants.”
    “Ah, yes.”
    Moore, who had been chief of the Europe Division of the Operations Directorate while I was stationed in Paris—my boss, to put it simply knew full well that the life of a clandestine operative actually meant unending tedious “fitness reports,” cables, lousy restaurants, and cold, rainy parking lots. After Laura’s murder, Moore had all but shoved me out the door of Langley headquarters, arranging my interview with Bill Steams in Boston. He felt strongly that it would be a serious mistake for me to remain in the Agency after what had happened. For a while I resented him for it, but I soon came to realize that he had my best interests at heart.
    Moore was a shy, bookish man an unlikely operations type, where the prevailing personality is boisterous, aggressive, canny. You would have pegged him for an analyst, an intelligence type, according to Agency nomenclature. Not at all a spymaster. He taught history at the University of Oklahoma at Norman before he was recruited to Army intelligence in the Second World War, and he was still an academic at heart.
    Outside, the wind howled, driving torrents of rain against the tall French doors at one end of the library, rattling the glass. The doors gave onto a beautifully landscaped garden, at the center of which was a small duck pond.
    The rainstorm had begun during dinner, which was a somewhat overdone pot roast served by Moore’s diminutive wife, Elena. We chatted about innocuous subjects presidential politics, the Middle East, the upcoming German general elections, gossip about mutual acquaintances and the painful one, the death of Hal Sinclair. Both Ed and Elena expressed their sincere condolences. After dinner Elena excused herself to go upstairs, leaving us to talk.
    Her entire married life, I imagined, had been spent excusing herself to go upstairs, or out of the room, or out for a walk, leaving her husband to talk shop with whatever spook happened to have dropped by. But she was far from colorless and retiring; she wielded