The Times, London, 29 May 1955:

Body of Unidentified Man Found in St. James's Park: The unclothed body of a man was discovered yesterday morning near the Royal Artillery Memorial in St. James's Park. Two small-caliber bullet wounds have been identified in the chest of the victim, who has been described by Scotland Yard officials as a Caucasian male between the ages of thirty and forty, of athletic build, with brown hair and blue eyes. He is thought possibly to have been an American. All attempts to identify the victim have been unsuccessful, and Scotland Yard officials are requesting the public contact them with any information about the victim or the murder, believed to have taken place during the night of the twenty-seventh.

* * * * *

What the brief story in the Times could not say was this: the man indeed was an American, age thirty-four, who could never be identified as his name was not listed in any official registry in any nation in the world. He was an operative in the most powerful and clandestine espionage agency in United States history--the "Superagent" program--and had been working covertly in the United Kingdom. His contacts, agents from the MI5 and MI6 British intelligence services, knew him only by the code name "Agent G." They had been led to believe he was working for the United States Agency of Central Intelligence.

At 0100 on the morning of the twenty-eighth, Agent G had been awaiting a rendezvous with an English agent behind the Royal Artillery Memorial in St. James's Park; each man was to carry a jagged portion of an English five-pound note they were to match together to insure each other's identity. They were meeting to discuss the assassination of a top-level Soviet SMERSH operative known as "Viktor" who had recently arrived in the United Kingdom.

Agent G was waiting in a break in the shrubs behind the large memorial; its bulk, and the trees and bushes behind it, shielded him from the traffic and lights of the Mall to the front and Horse Guards Road to the side, although both streets were practically deserted at this time of the early morning. Despite its central London location, the area behind the memorial was well situated for a covert meeting.

At 0102, Agent G saw a man walking purposefully around the memorial toward him; he assumed it was the English agent, although he had not yet met him in person. The Superagent held out his portion of the five-pound note, as did the Englishman: the serial number and cut edges were a match, confirming each man's identity to the other. Agent G was the first to speak.

"You're late, but it's good you've come. I've confirmed that Viktor is near, probably in London itself."

"Yes," said the English agent, "intelligence we have from our man in the KGB has confirmed that Viktor arrived last month."

"I believe he will begin assassination operations; probably of Western agents, or even British Cabinet members. He may also attempt to 'turn' agents that may be disgruntled or under financial strain given the present British economy."

"Agreed," the Englishman replied. "Do you have colleagues in the United Kingdom that I should put on alert? If so, tell me their locations and my people can warn them-with extreme discretion, naturally," he added.

"I work alone," said Agent G. "Can your KGB-mole pin-point Viktor's exact location?"

"There's no need. He's right here." Before Agent G could answer or reach for his weapon, the Englishman had a semi-automatic pistol pointed at the American, a silencer threaded on the end.

"Pheeewt! Pheeewt!" The pistol fired two bullets, each entering Agent G's heart and tearing open the thick, muscular left ventricle. The blood poured out of it, gushing with each contraction as the heart rhythm accelerated to over two hundred beats per minute in a vain attempt to keep him alive, and rapidly filled his thorax. He gasped, collapsed onto his knees, and then fell over onto the ground as his heart fibrillated. A moment later it stopped.

A tall, pale man walked around the corner of the memorial.

"It is finished?" he said in a thick, Slav accent.

"Yes. Perhaps we should have taken him, Viktor; made him talk," answered the English agent.

"Nyet," said the pale man. "The American had nothing to tell; it is better he is dead. I enjoy watching him die."

Agent G's assassination would go nearly unnoticed in Great Britain, aside from the brief commotion that an unsolved murder would naturally excite in that country. Five weeks later, on July 2nd, 1955, and 3,185 miles away, however, his death resulted in a very curious meeting that would prove crucial to the future security of the United States of America.

* * * * *

"This will be the only personal conversation you and I will ever have, Mr. K-------, and that will be the last time I will call you by your given name. Your new name is John Apparite."

The man now called John Apparite found it difficult to meet the gaze of the hard-looking character speaking so imperiously to him; a gaze so focused and intense it seemed there must be a well of white-hot fire burning behind the man's eyes to give it such power, reminding Apparite of the LASER prototype he had seen the month before. Averting his own eyes from that discomforting, piercing gaze, Apparite took a moment to size-up the rest of the man who was glaring at him so intently.

The Director, as Apparite would call him, looked like most men somewhere in their middle ages; he had some gray at the temples of his thinning black hair, and the wrinkles about his blue eyes were deep and hard. But the numbers Apparite tried to attach onto that cruel face didn't want to stick; he had to place him in the unsatisfying and broad category of "over fifty," and leave it at that. And there was something about the man's face that was very curious, Apparite thought; something that made it seem like it had always looked this way. For one thing, the Director had prominent wrinkles around his eyes, but the skin on the rest of his face was absolutely smooth, without any trace of sun exposure-it didn't seem likely it could have attained this appearance through the natural process of aging. Had the skin on his face been purposefully stretched to alter his appearance? Were those unusually deep furrows around his eyes really the result of the wear and tear of a hard life, or had they been chiseled there with intent? And the thought that this dour man had once been a baby who had parents that held him or made him laugh; well, that seemed absurd. This man was never born; he just was, and exactly as John Apparite was seeing him now.

The two men were sitting in a small room in a non-descript building somewhere in a run-down section of Washington, D.C.; no surprise, given the need for absolute discretion. On entering, Apparite, using his automatic powers of observation, estimated the room to be nine feet square and, despite the stifle that had come with this hot July day, he saw the sole window was closed airtight. The only exit was through the same door through which he had entered a minute before, leaving the man who had driven him to the tiny office sitting outside the room reading an issue of Life magazine from April (Apparite had noted the glamorous picture of Grace Kelly on its cover). The door to the little room was wooden and thick, without a window or transom, and there were no locks on it of any kind; a fact which struck him as being oddly out of place for a secret meeting.

The room was old and unkempt; a quick glance at the ceiling revealed the plaster had cracked considerably, leaving little dust-trails on the faded wooden floor where it had fallen, piece by piece-someone had picked up the larger chunks, but no one had swept the room in months, or maybe years, Apparite thought. The wallpaper, a fading, nicotine-stain yellow, had a light blue floral pattern (violas, he remarked to himself--what an odd place for a meeting of this importance!), and the edges of it were freely peeling away from the wall, exposing the crumbling, light-brown wallpaper paste that had been applied, oh, about thirty years ago, he estimated. Apparite had noted all of this in the time most persons take to glance at a passing car; it was one of his greatest talents, the instructors at the FBI Academy had told him.

The man facing Apparite did not appear to be sweating or even put-out one iota by the swelter in this hot-box of a room, despite the heavy, dull, black suit he was wearing--definitely not Italian, Apparite thought, and probably not even custom-made, judging from the slightly differing lengths of the sleeves. He sat behind one of those cheap, metal government-issue desks that populated governmental offices like the lower level bureaucrats enslaved behind them. The Director, however, was certainly no lower level bureaucrat, and this was certainly no lower level governmental office--it was much, much too shabby.

That was all there was to take note of, thought Apparite; there was no one else, and literally nothing else, in the little room. The closed window in the face of this ungodly heat, he mused, added a final touch of absurdity to the situation. "As you have accepted our offer, you must now know it is irrevocable," the Director said.

Apparite recalled the meeting he had a little over one week ago with another powerful man, Allen Dulles, the head of Central Intelligence, when he had been unexpectedly offered a "most secret and dangerous long-term assignment." He was promised "global travel, high pay, and higher stakes; just what a young man in your position should be looking for." Behind the salesman-like banter, however, Apparite had detected nervousness and suppressed excitement. Strange, he had thought at the time, that a man of such untouchable importance as Allen Dulles would betray his emotions (or even have such emotions) during a meeting with a new agent-and an agent who believed he was being summoned for dismissal, at that. The whole situation smacked of improbability if not impossibility, yet here Apparite was, about to be initiated into the absolute upper echelon of secret agency.

"Think about it," Dulles had told him in a business-like manner, "and let me know if you will accept this challenge." Dressed in a black suit, wearing frameless spectacles and taking leisurely puffs from a pipe filled with richly aromatic tobacco, the head of CI exuded competence and authority, and Apparite did not have to think long on the offer. He had already drawn in breath to answer in the affirmative, but his intentions were suddenly cut short by the unexpected interjection of words he would never forget. "If you tell anyone, I cannot protect your life," Dulles had quickly added.

The phrase had come out in an alarming change of tone, strained and cutting; a warning not unlike a snake's hiss which, for most people, would have chilled them to their core-but not for John Apparite. Rather than being frightened of it, he had felt curiously drawn to it, like a pathologist who unexpectedly stumbles upon a bloody corpse and pauses to examine it before summoning aid.

It was a phrase that would forever echo in his head, along with the words a Major Appleby had nervously stuttered on a frigid January day in 1945 ("The United States Government r-regrets to inform you that your father, Private Edwin K-------, was k-killed in combat with the enemy), and Assistant Deputy Charlie Bennett tearfully choked-out on a dewy autumn morning in 1947 ("I'm so sorry but, your ma; she was killed in a wreck, out on Highway Thirty-six"). Those deaths, and the words that heralded them, had carried him ever deeper into a world hidden from most ordinary persons; a world that had no limits in its cruelty, and was merciless in its finality. Apparite began to believe himself meant for that world, apparently being driven into it by fate.

The Director spoke, jarring Apparite back to the present day.

"When you walked through that door, you forfeited your previous life. I see you have questions--do not bother asking them. I already know what they are." He stared at Apparite, gauging his reaction to this declaration. Apparite tried to intensify his own gaze back at the man and meet this unspoken challenge: of course he wasn't going to ask questions; of course he knew there was no turning back. And yet he was horrified to discover that he was unable to silence that inner voice which kept running queries through his mind: How long, how secret, how dangerous, and finally, one directed at the mysterious Director himself: Who are you?

"You do not need to tell me about yourself, Apparite--there is nothing you can tell me that I do not already know. You are twenty-five years and one hundred twenty-two days old; you were born at ten-thirteen a.m. You were raised in Eckhart Springs, Maryland; a small town just west of Cumberland. Your upbringing was marked by an often-absent father, and an industrious, though caring mother. Although your family was one of meager means and possessions, your childhood was not overly marked by deprivation.

"Your father was killed in the Battle of the Bulge; your mother was killed in an automobile accident when you were seventeen; you have no living relatives. You graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in nineteen fifty-two; though you majored in Biological Science, you mastered the Romance Languages as well, and were elected Phi Kappa Phi. You began Special Agent FBI training after reaching the minimum age of twenty-three, graduating first in your class from the Academy. After serving with the Bureau for approximately one year, you were ear-marked for Central Intelligence, where you completed the Espionage Operations course at Camp Peary with the highest recommendation. You are fluent in six languages, including German and Russian, both of which you mastered during the E.O. course in record time. When approached about our opportunity by the Director of Central Intelligence, Mr. Dulles, you accepted the challenge without hesitation.

"You have had three lovers: two while in college and one while at the Federal Bureau of Investigation; their names were Betty, Rose, and, most recently, Margaret--who was the most attractive of the three, a slim brunette--though you were unable to form any lasting emotional attachment to any of them. They have been thoroughly investigated and cleared. You have established no close friendships these past eight years, and all of your childhood friends are scattered, or killed in the war. You have no homosexual tendencies. You do not smoke, and have never used marihuana or cocaine. You prefer beer to wine or distilled liquors. You have a tendency to drink to occasional excess, but it is not thought to be a risk. You are proficient in many athletic endeavors, including gymnastics and boxing--your favorite boxer is welterweight champion Carmen Basilio-and, since childhood, you have been an avid fan of the Washington Senators, attending many of their games despite their dismal record. You are left-handed."

This rattle of information, given without emphasis on any one particular, was, to Apparite, thorough though admittedly idiosyncratic-it seemed strange that the Director would lend equal weight to his education and the deaths of his parents as he would his old girlfriends and the baseball club he followed. Yet it was all absolutely true; every little detail had been accurate, right up to the color of his last girlfriend's hair. And, he noted with chagrin, the Director had been correct on another point: Apparite hadn't formed much of an attachment to any of his steadies. Even Margaret, a vivacious Jeanne Crain look-alike who indeed had been the sharpest-looking of the three (was there anything the Director didn't know?) could not make Apparite love her as she loved him; could not make him tremble if she held his hand, kissed him softly, or stroked his hair. In his heart, John Apparite had long been well-fortified against such emotional attacks, and it would take more than a mere college coed like Margaret to pierce his defenses.

Apparite had no idea where this strange interview was leading, but was beginning to feel slightly disoriented, and increasingly naked and uncomfortable. During his interrogation training, he remembered being told to keep his subjects off-balance, to never let them get emotional control of the situation; never let them predict the questions, or understand the motives of their questioner. The Director, Apparite noted, could have written the book on the subject.

"I am well aware of the unfortunate incident that prompted the Director of Central Intelligence to make final his recommendation of you for our program. In the E.O. hand-to-hand combat course, the instructor, a man called Bullard, took an immediate and inexplicable dislike to you. For the entire course he rode you mercilessly, yet you never responded in anger or defense. At one point, he even dared insult your dead mother; still, you did not respond. However," and the Director leaned forward, pointedly, "at the immediate completion of the course, you strode to the instructor's office at CIA headquarters and challenged him to a fight, despite the fact he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than you, plus infinitely more experienced in karate and street fighting. He accepted, and the fight commenced in the hall outside his office in full view of seven individuals, including Mr. Dulles."

Apparite tensed slightly in remembrance: yes, he had chanced dismissal, but day after day of that SOB Bullard taunting him, berating him, had pushed him over the edge. And then there had been the long months of waiting, waiting, waiting for the right time to do it; let him think you're a coward, but when no longer under the constraints of his orders, teach the brute a lesson-he was certain that his instructor, like all bullies, was over-confident and would underestimate a smaller opponent. Apparite had walked right into Bullard's office, and to issue his challenge, he hadn't even had to speak-he simply nodded to him with a look of defiance and anger, and they had walked out into the hall.

Apparite had assumed his karate fighting-stance; his instructor had then come at him with a textbook karate kick aimed for the neck; to Apparite, the kick had seemed unusually slowed and distant, as if viewed through a gel. He had easily side-stepped it and unleashed a wicked, lightning thrust of the side of his outstretched left hand, fingers and thumb extended, to the tender space between the man's fourth and fifth ribs.

The instructor had clutched his right flank, howling, backed up a step or two, and then come at Apparite again. A series of rapid, short jabs-all misses-then a round-house kick; again, for Apparite, time had slowed, and when the man's leg was fully extended with the kick, Apparite had dropped to the ground, one leg splayed, and swept it under the larger man's planted foot; the instructor had hit the ground and hard, the air leaving him like a deflating ball.

Apparite had sprung to his feet and waited for the instructor to rise, reassuming his stance. The instructor had come at him again, hands and feet thrusting and kicking, hoping to overwhelm Apparite in a flurry of blows, but none would connect. After one particularly lunging, over-reaching thrust had missed, Apparite had grabbed the instructor's outstretched arm and savagely kicked him between his vulnerable ribs; he had felt them yield and break, as easily as a wafer in a hungry child's hand. The man had fallen like a shot face-down onto the unyielding tile floor, his breaths gasping and spasmodic. Apparite had then leapt upon him, straddling him; right leg digging into those broken ribs, left hand on his neck, with his right hand evilly bending the man's right arm back, back. "Submit," Apparite had growled.

"Go to hell!"

"Submit!"

"Go f--- yourself!"

Apparite had felt the man's arm start to yield; the torque he was applying had begun to bend the humerus and stretch the shoulder joint beyond anything God or man had designed. At any moment, he had expected it to snap, dislocate.

"All right!" A new voice; an angry voice, had spoken. "Let him up!"

Apparite had then heard the unmistakable click of a revolver cocking, and had let loose his victim's arm. A senior agent had his .45 trained on him.

"Mr. Dulles wants to see you. Now."

Ten minutes later, Apparite was in Allen Dulles' office, and the "most secret and dangerous assignment" was his. Ten days later, he was in this curious meeting with the mysterious Director.

"You put one of the toughest men at CI in the hospital for a week with a punctured lung and multiple rib fractures. Good: CI instructors have a tendency to become cocky, and every so often one needs to be taken down a peg. You might be interested to hear that the instructor, now that he has left the infirmary, has been reassigned to Alaska in punishment for his humiliation.

"The incident demonstrated that you have exceptional physical conditioning, reflexes, and fighting skills--you handled him quite easily despite the fact you were considerably smaller than he. Your speed and quickness has been noted to be of the highest caliber, and the ophthalmologists tell me your eyesight is particularly exceptional: twenty-ten left eye; twenty-oh-eight right eye. Your medical history includes an aortic heart murmur, but it is not thought to be a risk at this time. You have had no surgical procedures. You had mumps at age five-sparing your testicles-and chicken pox at age nine, but no serious medical illnesses. You have no uniquely identifying marks: unusual. I note that you are five feet six inches tall and weigh one hundred forty-one pounds."

There was a prolonged, purposeful pause: why? Apparite wondered if he should speak, but then thought better of the idea-maybe he was being tested in some way.

"I repeat: you are five feet six inches tall and weigh one hundred forty-one pounds. As you well know, the minimum height for the Academy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is five feet seven inches tall with a weight of one hundred forty-five pounds. I know, of course, how you managed to slip through on this matter during your FBI training, even if the fools at the FBI do not."

Yes, the FBI had never caught on to his little ruse, those tricks that had kept him in the Academy, but it had been worth it. After college, Apparite had hated the idea of having a "normal" job like his mother, who had been a biology teacher in a dull secondary school in the Allegheny Mountains. He detested even more the idea of working in sales like his father, traveling the length of the Atlantic Coast trying to get people with no money to buy insurance. Insurance! For what--their property? In the thirties and forties most had none; it had been swallowed up in the Great Depression. Their lives? Worthless without jobs, decent homes, clothes--hell, without decent anything.

Most of the able-bodied men in his quiet, mountainside Maryland town had joined the Army right out of high school--if they had even made it through high school--for the proverbial "three hots and a cot" and warm clothes on their backs. Apparite, however, had always been more ambitious than his peers. He had longed for something he could not get in sleepy Eckhart Springs, and which definitely did not come in the U.S Army uniform that had forever marked his last memory of his father (even after his father's death there had been unhappy reminders: in 1945 the Army had sent him his father's dog-tags and a letter of condolence in the mail; Apparite refused to read it, and threw the dog-tags on the scrap heap).

So as a boy he had lost his father in the war, and as a young man he had lost his mother in a wreck and, soon after, John Apparite had lost himself; had lost his connection with the rest of humanity. Sure, he had had some buddies at College Park, but he'd never really let anyone get to know him, and he hadn't wanted to get to know anyone else, either--not after the pain of losing his parents, not to mention half the young men from his hometown who'd joined the 29th Division and got shot-up before they took even one step out of their Higgins Boats at Omaha Beach. After all of the pain and death in his life, Apparite's girlfriends and college buddies never stood much of a chance: he was a hopeless case.

After Apparite had graduated from college, about all anyone seemed to remember of him was that he was easily the most rabid Washington Senators fan they had ever met. The "Nats" had been such an intense obsession for Apparite that he seemed incapable of sharing it with anyone who had a lesser passion for the club; which was, of course, just about everybody. All of his attempts to find a comrade-in-arms therefore proved spectacularly unsuccessful, although he never minded showing even a complete stranger his most prized possession: a Walter Johnson tobacco card, signed by the Senators Hall of Famer himself. Apparite always carried it with him; like a talisman against ill fortune. As far as his life had gone so far, it had not been a rousing success.

With his university degree and "lucky" baseball card in hand, Apparite had joined the FBI to satisfy his craving for something new, something exciting-anything to keep his mind off the tragedies of his past. How appealing the lifestyle, the extreme responsibility, and even the danger of being an FBI agent had seemed to him at the time! And he had indeed gone through FBI training and even the quiet intensity of CI espionage training without connecting with anyone, just as he had wanted, spending all of his time and energy training as hard as he could, and doing what he was supposed to do. Who cares if he was too short for FBI standards? Who cares if he only weighed 141 pounds? That had never mattered a whit to Apparite-all that had mattered was that he did his exercises and his duties better than anyone else. So far, he had not let himself down.

Apparite looked at the Director in surprise and embarrassment--his FBI ruse had finally been exposed. He sat up a bit more in his chair-unconsciously, perhaps, in an effort to make up that inch and those pounds--and waited to be dismissed. Why bring me here, he wondered, only to be humiliated? The Director broke the uncomfortable silence.

"I believe you are ideal for our purposes."

Apparite breathed a quiet sigh of relief, though his inner voice broke through his defenses and asked one last unanswerable question: What the hell have you gotten yourself into?

The Director spoke again; loudly, authoritatively.

"Directive number one: Maintenance of Secrecy. Directive number two: Mission Completion. Directive number three: Minimization of Civilian Casualties. Directive number four: Minimization of Property Destruction. The directives are non-negotiable and are in absolute order of importance. You will not forget them.

"You will be joining the most covert espionage program in existence. Not only is it entirely unknown to your old colleagues at the FBI, there are just three officials in the United States Government--other than myself--who are aware of it, and only because their resources are required for it to function: the Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Director of the National Security Agency. Significant exposure of the program's nature or existence might result in the public humiliation-or even the assassination-of any of these persons. Secrecy, therefore, is of the utmost importance."

The Director again paused; what Apparite could not know was that, for the first time as director of his unique program, he was taking a chance on an agent. Apparite was unproven in the field, but had the skills and potential to be the greatest intelligence agent the United States had ever seen-that had been obvious to all at the FBI and CIA. The only unknown was the level of commitment of this capable young man, which the Director thought might be found in the answer to this question: Just how far would the newly-christened John Apparite go to protect his program?

The Director resumed speaking, a knowing look on his face.

"You are wondering about the President. The President is not, and cannot be made aware of this program for his own protection and in the interests of national security. Final authority rests with me: in the event of catastrophic mission failure, I will be assassinated and the program disbanded. You will be in the program for no less than four years, and no more than eight years, pursuant to a suitable replacement being found when you have fulfilled your duties. At program completion, you will be given a new identity, passport, and five million U.S. dollars deposited into a Swiss bank account."

Another pause; Apparite felt his face warming, as though he was actually being touched by the Director's continually probing eyes. The Director held the silence a beat longer than seemed natural and spoke again.

"Your old life has ended. Your colleagues at the FBI and CIA believe you are dead."

The Director glanced at his watch and fixed those burning eyes back on Apparite, to the young man's continued discomfort.

"You died seventeen minutes ago in an automobile accident. Your charred corpse will be discovered in the wreckage of your black nineteen forty-eight Studebaker; the dental records will match, and the appropriate identification documents will be found. Your funeral will be next Tuesday near your hometown of Eckhart Springs."

Apparite found that his mouth had slowly fallen open, his eyes widening with the realization that he had passed a fail-safe point he had not seen coming: he had expected to be "sheep-dipped," of course, and leave his old life behind him, but he had not expected it would be unceremoniously snuffed-out in this manner. And what's more, though he realized the ridiculous nature of the complaint, they had destroyed his car! A fine used car he had paid nearly two hundred dollars for! Curiously, that rankled him more than anything else; even his supposed demise.

And yet, he could not help but chuckle inwardly at the gross absurdity of it: everyone in his family had now died a tragic, untimely death. Apparite privately wished the Director would "bury" him next to his mother in that beautiful mountaintop cemetery in the Alleghenies, where the unceasing wind would whip off everyone's hats during the funeral, mussing the hair of those few townsfolk who would show up for it. Their main reason for coming, Apparite figured, would probably be for the fried chicken and potato salad at the luncheon afterwards, but that was alright by him.

He could hardly believe it, but he was genuinely amused at the thought; he almost wished he could be there for the burial. Looking at the Director, and guessing how his diabolical mind worked, Apparite was certain that next Tuesday a lovely walnut coffin would be lowered into the last of his family's plots, the headstone reading, F---- K-------, 1930-1955, beloved son of…et cetera. Damn, but he was sure of it. Slowly, in the vain hope that the Director would not notice his reaction, he closed his still half-opened mouth and refocused his gaze. The Director, having briefly paused to read the curious look which had appeared on Apparite's face, then continued. "There have been a total of five Superagents since program inception; two are active at any given time. You will be pleased to hear that one has lived to complete his program and is now living comfortably abroad. As for the others, three have been killed in the line of duty and another is on active duty. You will be replacing Agent G, who was recently murdered in the United Kingdom; we are still gathering information on this matter. I do not want you to view his death as a bad omen; the perception of luck--good or bad--should not enter into the performance of your duties.

"The two active Superagents do not work together and are assigned to different parts of the globe. The other agent is presently operating in Eastern Europe; your responsibilities will primarily be in the United States and Western Europe. You will have absolute power and discretion to complete your missions. You will have inexhaustible financial and technological resources to complete your missions. You will therefore have no excuses if you are unsuccessful.

"You wonder how we maintain secrecy, and yet have access to such resources--it is surprisingly simple. The bureaucracy of the United States Government is the largest in the world; within its bloat of paperwork and offices hundreds faithfully serve us, yet none have any awareness of whom they actually work for, duped into believing they serve Central Intelligence, the FBI, or the National Security Agency, among others. We hide in the cracks and crevices of this bureaucracy, using its resources and feeding on its infinite intelligence gathering capabilities-as invisible as the microscopic insects that live in our eyebrows and scavenge dead skin for food. "We have used these tools to effectively infiltrate the bureaucracies of other nations, friendly or not (we have found the communists and socialists to be particularly accommodating). As a result, our intelligence exceeds not only that of the vaunted FBI, but also Central Intelligence, Interpol, MI Six, the KGB, and even the secret alliances within the NSA. Do you understand?"

Apparite nodded; speaking would have been too difficult, and betrayed his awe at what he was being told. He had served in the FBI himself, and had never heard even one faint rumor about the Director's agency--to think that all of this was going on right under the noses of the famous J. Edgar Hoover and his "G-Men"! And at CI, well, there were always rumors about "splinter-cells" and rogue agents, but no one took them seriously--and now he was the most rogue of agents in the most splintered of cells in the world! To be able to operate at will in the Director's agency, using every resource of the most powerful government in the history of the world, was alluring--almost intoxicating--to him.

"For official program purposes, you will be known only as Agent E; for security reasons, the name John Apparite will be unknown in any file. The other active Superagent, in case you are wondering, is known as Agent B; it is imperative that you never be told his true name or meet him, again for security purposes. For reasons of program secrecy, I am not assigned any name or title whatsoever. My assistant, whom you will call 'J,' will be your liaison in the field, as I seldom travel outside of the District of Columbia. You will remain in close contact with J or, at the beginning of each mission, be given a telephone number or address where you may contact him. If so, you will memorize the information, then burn or eat the paper before leaving the room in which you receive it."

This was a bit much, thought Apparite--actually eat the paper? It sounded like something from a bad radio-play--surely he wouldn't have to do that sort of thing! It seemed quite out of place for the Director to talk about unlimited resources and power in one sentence, and eating a secret phone number in the next. Apparite feared the situation was becoming comical, and he was having a much more difficult time holding his steely countenance. A look of bemusement-or was it confusion?-had started to creep onto his face.

"I see you are amused by some of our practices. You consider them quaint, but you do not know the danger you create when you think so. A Superagent must be protected twenty-four hours a day; protected from the enemy and protected from himself. The greatest danger of exposure is from within the program-it cannot occur. Each Superagent therefore has a companion agent--a 'Shadow-agent'--who is instructed to kill him if the program is significantly and irrevocably breached during the course of a mission. The Shadow will remain no more than two hours automobile travel from the Superagent at any time: you will not know who your Shadow is, but he will know who you are." The Director stopped talking once again. Apparite said nothing; he was unwilling or perhaps unable to break the claustrophobic silence in the hot little room. After another very long, discomforting silence, the Director resumed speaking.

"The United States has many enemies. Some are obvious--the KGB and SMERSH, the Red Chinese, the East German HVA--while others are not; some are even from within. Those who wish to harm the interests of the United States must be defeated; we must protect those interests using whatever means are necessary: period." The Director's voice was rising in intensity, and a slight tremble began to emanate from his hands.

Finally, Apparite thought, some emotion from this automaton, although the obvious explanation for it disturbed him: was the Director some sort of secret agent version of communist-baiter Joe McCarthy, meting out his own brand of vicious and radical justice, oblivious to the world outside him? This strangely intense man struck Apparite as the type who didn't enjoy doing anything other than, say, killing Red spies, or destroying East German listening posts, or shooting down Chinese spy planes, and the like. Obviously, the man was not the type to joke or kid around with, or relax and have a beer with, or even, thought Apparite as he swatted away a pesky fly, find a decent place to sit and interrogate a potential colleague. What kind of man would take a job where he worked in a hellhole like this? What kind of man would take a job which would never allow him any real human contact? The answer came to him immediately: a dangerous man, that's who. And then another thought struck Apparite: maybe he, too, was that kind of man. Maybe that was the reason he'd been chosen.

The Director, wiping his sweaty brow and rearranging his face into its previously rigid incarnation, opened the left-side drawer from the sickly-green desk. He removed a semi-automatic pistol, a Beretta 1951, which he placed on the aluminum top. He then opened the right-side drawer of the desk, removing a clip and a silencer from it. With that familiar, deep, metallic click, the Director thrust the clip into the Beretta, and then, in a smooth single movement, threaded the silencer onto the protruding end of the weapon. Quietly, and in his usual emotionless monotone, he spoke again.

"The man who drove you here is waiting outside this room, correct?"

Apparite nodded. The driver, a quiet, bearded man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties, wearing dirty dungarees, a stained yellow shirt, glasses, and a Senators baseball cap, had picked him up from his apartment at ten a.m. sharp. As Apparite had entered the car, the driver had given him a typed note: "Do not speak to the driver." The journey, a disorienting array of U-turns, cut corners, and back alleys was done in a complete and eventually stifling silence. On arrival, the driver had gotten out, opened Apparite's door, tipped his cap to him, and handed him a second note: "The driver will accompany you. He will wait outside the meeting room." The Director spoke again.

"You do not need to worry about the driver over-hearing us; he is deaf and mute, and I have often used him in these situations, although to my knowledge we have never met in person. I am, however, displeased to point out that when you entered this room, he had a brief, unfortunate glimpse of my unshielded face, and appeared to recognize me. You will therefore take the pistol from on top of the desk, open the door, motion for him to come in, and shoot him through the heart."

Apparite tried against all his instincts not to feel the impact of this command, but had to ask himself, was the Director serious? Or was this some sort of perverse test? He studied the expression on the Director's face, but saw only the same emotionless stare that had been burning a hole through him these last ten minutes. Apparite then realized that this was no exercise-he was going to have to shoot the unlucky SOB.

But he had never killed a man before--what would it be like? he wondered. He had talked to men back home that had shot and killed Germans in the war, but this was different-unlike the driver, the Germans had not been innocent, unsuspecting, and unarmed.

Regardless, the distinction didn't matter much to him, once he had given it some thought. The driver looked like a nice enough guy, but Apparite didn't know or care much about him--he didn't even know his name. The only thing Apparite cared for at the moment was the doing of his duty, and if it took the killing of the man wearing the Senators cap to fulfill it, then so be it. Killing the driver wouldn't feel much different than shooting that twelve-point buck he had bagged back home last fall, he surmised; crouched in a tree, he had seen it searching for some berries and felled it with a single, skilled rifle shot through the heart. The driver might be a different kind of prey, but if Apparite was there to do it then he would get it done, and the result would be the same. His only regret was that it would be a shame to kill a fellow "Nats" fan--as far as he was concerned, they could use all the support they could get. Well, too bad, he concluded; I can't let that stop me.

Apparite reached over, silently picked up the pistol in his right hand, and slowly walked over to the door. He opened it a few inches and motioned with his free hand for the unsuspecting driver to come in the room. He then stepped back from the doorway, smoothly transferred the weapon back into his left hand, assumed his firing stance, and waited.

Slowly, as Apparite forced away the foreknowledge he was going to kill in cold blood, he saw the driver coming through the doorway in a prolonged reveal of dungarees, grease-stained yellow shirtsleeve, and Senators baseball cap. He counted down the targets as they appeared in apparent slow-motion: right lung, aorta, left lung, precordium of the heart, and then he squeezed the trigger. Apparite might have been interested to know that his heart rate had remained a cool and unaffected fifty-two beats per minute and, despite the heat, he had not broken into a sweat.

"Click. Click-click-click-click": a dummy clip. The driver stopped, grinned slightly, took out a cigarette, and lit it with a silver Zippo. The Director spoke.

"What were you thinking, Apparite? You may speak."

"I thought nothing," he said.

It was true. When Apparite had seen his target, he had pictured the twelve-point buck and then simply done what he had to do: the man had become just another trophy to bag in the hunt; the task just another to be checked off the list. It had been much easier than he had thought it would be, too. Emptying his mind of the significance of pulling that trigger and killing a fellow human had been disturbingly easy to him.

"Good," the Director said. "It is not your duty to think when commanded. You acted without hesitation, as I expected."

The Director paused briefly to lend his next statement the impact it deserved.

"If you had not, the driver had been instructed to terminate you immediately."

As the deadly nature of the test sunk in, Apparite slowly let out the breath he had not realized he had been holding.

The Director motioned to the driver to leave, Apparite noting that the man did so with unusual stealth and quiet. And as the driver passed through the doorway, Apparite caught a brief flash of silver metal under his untucked shirt-tail: a pistol. Was he a Shadow-agent? No, Apparite concluded, and even if he was, he would not have been his own; they'd never let him meet his own. The other Superagent, perhaps? Apparite wished he had studied the bearded face under that ball-cap more closely.

"You have questions," the Director said, surprising Apparite with his prescience. "You want to know whether that man is in my employ. He is, although, like so many others, he does not know for whom he is working. You also wish to know whether this is a standard situation for a potential agent in my program--it is. But I sense you have one more question you need to ask. You may ask it."

Apparite could feel the sweat rising on his brow and his heart beating slightly faster. There was one thing he had to know, and it was the only part of the test that was still eating at him.

Would the Director really have done it? Would he have actually killed him if he hadn't pulled that trigger? After all the testing and probing and mind-games, Apparite had to know if this one thing was true. He felt the question both men knew was coming suddenly leap out of his throat.

"Has anyone ever hesitated? And been--?"

"No, not yet."

"But if they did, would you--?"

"Yes. Without hesitation, Apparite"

To his surprise, Apparite was relieved to hear this. He thought that someday he might even know the reason why.