The French Decision [antikvár]

PrologueFifty miles out of Washington they swung north away from the Shenandoah and the soft Virginia countryside turned raggedly poor and lonely.In a little while they drove through a heavily rebutted underpass which traversed Interstate Highway 81 and then, just past the West Virginia border, turned down a wash-boarded dirt road which disappeared into the back-country through sumac and cat briar. Although crowded between two young men in the back seat, it was his first sense of being truly a prisoner since they'd picked him up two hours earlier at his apartment in North Arlington. He wanted to ask who they were, where they were taking him and why. But he couldn't find the courage to face what inner terror told him the answer might be and he kept silentIn the intense summer heat everything seemed dead. They crossed a stagnant creek on a bridge of old rail ties, splintered and grey from sun and rain. Chalky dust rose in a white cloud behind them. This morning he had risen, showered, breakfasted and had driven across the Potomac into the capital, to the monolith that housed the Department of State. It seemed a lifetime ago.He worked for the INR, the State Department's Intelligence Research Bureau where he headed a relatively important department. At nine-thirty, a senior executive, looking suspiciously uneasy, had appeared in his office door to summon him upstairs and he'd had an instant stab of premonitory fear. As they silently walked to the elevators, he tried to think of some place along the line where he might have slipped up.There were a number of people present at his interrogation, mostly top-level men and one he later decided was from the FBI's counter-intelligence unit. It was inmiediately clear there was no point in his professing innocence. They