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Despite being birthed from the same organization, over the years the CIA and Special Forces had more often been at each other's throats than allied in a common cause. This came to a head during the Vietnam War, when Special Forces felt it was being used by the Agency to fight its own dirty war. Many of the Agency's most controversial programs, such as Phoenix, were staffed by Green Berets. But when it came time for the Agency to support several Special Forces men accused of murdering a double agent at Nha Trang in 1969, the Agency refused to back up the military men, leaving them to dangle.

The CIA had many ups and downs in the first fifty years of its existence. On the darker side lay early events like the Bay of Pigs. Of more noteworthy mention during that time period was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Abuses during the Cold War led to the formation of the Select Committee on Intelligence, which was at first supposed to be temporary, but was changed into a permanent organization in 1976, allowing Congress oversight on intelligence matters.

In 1982, President Reagan signed a bill exempting the CIA from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, reversing a decade-long trend of more openness.

On the grounds at Langley, a piece of the Berlin Wall was set up as a memorial to what the CIA considered its greatest victory — the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A solitary figure was now passing that memorial, the lights highlighting the cracked concrete piece of wall casting his long shadow along the walkway heading toward one of the new office towers.

The man noted the piece of the wall every time he passed it because it represented several things to him. One was indeed the fall of the Soviet Union, but Karl Hancock wasn't too sure how much the CIA had had to do with that; in fact, having worked in covert operations for over thirty years, he knew how much CIA distortion of Russian military capabilities had added to American paranoia for decades and maintained the Western side of the Cold War at a footing far beyond what was truly necessary.

The reality of the unreality of covert operations was what the wall memorial represented to Hancock. And that reality could be manipulated by those who understand it to fit their own purposes.

Hancock pulled his ID out for the rent-a-cop security guards who manned the entrance to the building. The first layer of security. He again pulled it out as he passed through the second layer, this time showing it to guards who were actually CIA personnel. He boarded an elevator and descended below the surface to sublevel three. He exited into a small lobby, where he was required to get his retinas scanned before the steel door on the other side would open. A guard sitting in a booth enclosed in bulletproof glass watched him without expression as he performed the maneuver. Hancock walked down a black-marble-floored hallway, passing framed placards with the Agency's vision, mission and values engraved on them. He didn't waste any of his time reading them. Public relations devices to appease a country that wanted to be safe and free but didn't want to be dirtied by the processes necessary to ensure that in a world full of dirty players.

At the end of the hall a large CIA seal was bolted to the wall; double doors beckoned to either side. A fork in the road. To the left was the operations center. To the right, the Center for Direct Action.

The Operations Center had a large sign identifying it. CDA simply had a black falcon painted on the steel, one claw of the falcon holding a lightning bolt, the other the American flag. Hancock had had it put there when he took over CDA and he always paused to appreciate the art before pushing the doors open.

Hancock went down to the end of the hallway beyond the falcon painting to another steel door. He put his palm on the panel to the left of the door. It swung open with a hiss. He walked into his office, putting his coat on a hook just inside the armored door.

His desk was large and flat, without anything on it. To the left of the desk, eight chessboards were set on a marble pedestal. Each board had different motifs for the pieces, ranging from the traditional, through a Napoleonic motif, Civil War motif, and a World War II one. Seven of the eight had games in progress on them, the pieces frozen in the midst of their combat. Hancock stopped and stared at the Civil War board for several moments. The game was in the early stages, only a few pieces moved.

With a sigh, Hancock turned. Just before he left his office he paused and looked at the cluster of framed pictures on the wall to the right of his door. There were several of him in the White House War Room with Presidents from Nixon through the current administration. Never the Oval Office, where publicity shots were taken — that was for the director and the chief of Operations. The chief of Direct Action only went to the White House through the underground tunnel from the Vice President's office building and only met with the administration officials in the secure War Room, three hundred feet under the White House. And the CDA only went to the White House when dirty work needed to be done.

Hancock's eyes paused on a particular photo — he was seated at the War Room conference table; standing behind him with a hand on Hancock's shoulder was former National Security Adviser Hill, now currently awaiting trial for his role in the Red Flyer teams and other purported abuses of power.

Hancock's gaze continued to another photo. A much younger Hancock was on a deep-sea fishing boat with another man. A muscle on the left side of Hancock's face jerked. The other man had the same angular face as Hancock, the major difference being the other man's hair wasn't yet burned white — nor would it ever be.

Hancock left his office, retracing his steps to the main corridor, the sounds of the taps on his highly polished shoes echoing off the walls. He crossed the main hallway and entered the other department that took up the third sublevel of the basement.

Night or day, the Operations Center at Langley functioned at the same level of intensity and manning. That was because the section was responsible for the entire globe, and while it was night over Washington it was daylight over half the world.

Also, despite all the advances in technology, night was still the preferred time for covert operations. Hancock kept walking while he took in the massive status board — an eighty-foot- long-by-thirty-high electronic map of the world. Anything of significance to the intelligence community was highlighted on the board with a briefly noted box.

Right now, the largest box, indicating its relative importance, and backed in red — indicating it was vital to U.S. interests — was hovering over Bosnia-Herzegovina. Hancock walked over to one of the terminals. He brought up a smaller image of the one on the screen, then clicked over the box. He read the summary, then closed the box.

Hancock pushed open the door to one of the sound-and bug-proofed conference rooms off the main action center. A younger man was seated at the end of the conference table.

"What do you have?" Hancock asked. He was in his late forties and he looked trim and fit in his three-piece suit. His voice held a tint of finishing school or perhaps a lot of practice in front of a mirror. As chief of Direct Action, CDA, a classified section answerable only to the director and the President, Hancock held the greatest non-visible power inside the CIA. The CDA did what Operations used to do before Operations became subject to public scrutiny and congressional censure. The Oversight Committee didn't even know the CDA existed.

Welwood worked in Operations, the strongest visible part of the CIA. As such he was answerable to the chief of Operations. But the C/O was a new appointee, the first woman ever to hold such a high rank in the old-boy Agency, and there were many in operations who feared for their careers working for a woman who was going to be scrutinized for every decision she made or failed to make. If she went down, they'd all take a hit, and Hancock knew Welwood was smart enough to know he needed to cultivate friends elsewhere in the Agency's bureaucracy.