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Allison had told him—when they were shrink and patient instead of lovers—that he needed extreme challenges. He didn’t know if he needed them but he certainly thrived in that environment. He liked it more than dealing with the directors, deputy directors, assistant directors, secretaries, and undersecretaries in the nation’s capital, all of whom were grabbing people and glory as if national security were a game of jacks. It was about power first and the populace second. And then there was the lame-duck administration that had only a few months left of its spotty eight years. Everyone was busy networking for new jobs on a grand scale, looking for work instead of doing it. The district was politically calm but structurally chaotic, like a corpse full of maggots that would suddenly erupt—
    He focused on clouds that were changing the light and color on the trees below them. He wanted to think about that right now, not about the mausoleum to the south.
    He liked Allison a lot and enjoyed being with her. He liked the work he did because he had just enough ego to appreciate having the fate of a major metropolis or somebody’s loved one resting on his shoulders. But after a score of years on the job he was out of gas. And he didn’t know where a refill was coming from.
    “Would you like coffee?” Ellie asked.
    “Yes, thank you,” he said. “I also want to ask you something.”
    “Yes?”
    “Can I look at the hangar?”
    “Of course. Do you fly?”
    “Not a bit,” he said. “But I’m thinking this would be the time and place to learn.”
    They had coffee on the stone patio overlooking the Housatonic Valley and talked about her husband, Douglas, who had died in a fall from a bridge in Tennessee.
    “Going that way would have pleased him, if he hadn’t hit his head first and been unconscious all the way down,” she said without remorse. “We had fifty-two glorious years, partly because he was away so much. I don’t say that to be flip or derogatory. We never had a chance to get tired of each other. A few months together and then, bam! He was off somewhere else.”
    “No children?” Kealey asked.
    “We both didn’t think it was fair, with him being away so much,” she said. “And I didn’t mind. The animals in the forest were my babies, just like in a Disney cartoon. I can’t tell you how many generations of rabbits I fed in the warren behind the house. Left the dead ones for predators.” She shrugged. “They have to eat, too. That also left me free to go with Douglas when it was a place I wanted to visit. I loved taking pictures, scrapbooking—though it wasn’t called that, then. It was just putting photos in an album with other keepsakes and labeling them.”
    That kind of verbal bloat was true in his business, too, Kealey thought. When he came to the CIA, the words spy and spook, not intelligence agent and surveillance specialist, were still the common vernacular. He missed those days when people were tracked by eye and not by a GPS in their cell phone. It was also more efficient, then. People on the ground were trained to observe. They came back with more data, more detail, not just an individual’s location. The overwhelming reliance on ELINT, electronic intelligence, covered more ground and let fewer people watch more people—like the government did through e-mails and social networking sites. But it lost nuance. Only the Israelis did both in equal measure, ELINT and HUMINT, making sure the faces of trackers were seen so they could become trusted, even embraced by their targets. Terror cells could be broken that way, or by blasting them with a drone missile. The Israeli way made sure there was little or no collateral damage.
    Kealey was about to tell the woman he wanted to buy the place when his phone beeped.
    “Well, at least you’ve got reception,” Ellie grinned.
    “Not sure I want it,” Kealey said as he glanced at the name. It was Jonathan Harper, deputy director of the CIA.