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may have been exacerbated by the fact that FITCH, the Officer of the Watch at the time, was drunk at his station in the wheelhouse. FITCH was examined by a Coast Guard medic in the chopper en route to Singapore and was found to have a blood-alcohol level equal to the level of complete intoxication, according to Singaporean authorities. A gash in his rib cage that FITCH contended was a bullet wound was found to be inconclusive, since no round was discovered in the wound. FITCH was held, pending a full maritime inquiry by the Singapore Police, and local sources say he is being interrogated by Singaporean officials at a secure facility in an unknown location. This incident was tagged and forwarded to Langley HQ for further action by our staff at Singapore Sub-Station HALO because an intake body scan conducted by Singapore SID revealed an Agency tracing implant registered to a contract employee (6064-988C) of the Agency at LONDON STATION (seconded from the SAS) (real name RAYMOND PAGET FYKE—operational code IBIS) and was at the time of his disappearance in November of 2002 under a DETAIN / SEQUESTER / DO NOT INTERROGATE order filed with INTERPOL and related agencies, which raises the issue that the debriefing of IBIS by Singaporean Intelligence officers may constitute a serious security risk for the USA. MESSAGE ENDS.

CLASSIFIED UMBRA DNC

    CLANDESTINE SERVICES

    EXECUTE/ADDENDUM re xr266gt EYES/DIAL

    Preliminary Humlnt received from agents on site in Singapore has been evaluated by this office and it has been concluded that the unilateral and unrestricted interrogation of IBIS by Singaporean SID agents or their official proxies is an unacceptable risk to national security.

    Therefore London Station, as the last station of active service for IBIS, will take such immediate action as is necessary to remedy the situation and neutralize the vulnerability by any means available and without restriction. Results only will be recorded. Zulu time initiates immediately. Operational Protocols appended:

    DIAL/EYES—DG/CS—CATHER

3

    Kotor, Montenegro

    Branco Gospic, a heavy-bodied, slope-shouldered bull of a man with cold gray eyes and a bald skull distorted into a chestnut shape by a near-miss mortar round, was sitting stiffly upright—his bullet-pocked belly would tolerate no other position—on an iron bench on the pillared balcony of his villa overlooking the Montenegrin coastal village of Kotor. The ancient fortress spread itself out below him, a stirring prospect if the man had cared to care—which it was not in his nature to do—a sweeping view of a fjordlike, craggy coast, the huge slab-sided mountain walls rising up to meet the parapet of the medieval fortress on the peak, built by the Venetians in the years of their naval power to stem the northward tide of the Ottoman Turks. The great triangular fort overlooked a blade-shaped deepwater inlet filled with pleasure boats and trawlers, and out to the far west the slate-gray sea churned with shards of glassy light as the pale winter sun slid down into Italy on the far shore of the Adriatic.

    Two hundred feet beneath his balcony, a broad, stone-paved seawallstuck out into the water like the prow of a battleship. Although fall was dying in the air and the first snowflakes of winter were feathering the stones of Venice, on the eastern side of the Adriatic the evening was still just warm enough for the people of the old town to be out walking the seawall; pretty girls in Parisian dresses, gliding along on shell pink clouds of self-esteem, watched by roving packs of sharply dressed young men, sporting huge mustachios in the latest Serbian manner; sagging old men, burned out by the eternal ethnic wars, staring out to sea with glazed, dead eyes; feral children, running wild on the stones, calling out with harsh voices, their green kites trailing in the salt wind.

    Gospic, a tactical, self-directed man with no eye, and less time, for beauty of any sort, noticed none of this: his