Washington Deceased Read Online Free

bases, but that this was no excuse for confusing nation states with gentlemen. He thought that espionage was important, he observed that the CIA was good at it, and he was therefore glad that the spooks were there.
    The only problem, as he saw it, lay in two nagging CIA deficiencies: an ignorance of local geography—the CIA thought that the United States Department of State was located in Langley, Virginia; and a problem with arithmetic—the CIA thought that the United States had only one branch of government.
    The remedy, Michaelson thought, was quite clear. Since the CIA was good at spying on other countries but not good at telling the State Department and Congress everything it found out, the efficient thing for the State Department to do was to spy on the CIA.
    This Michaelson had proceeded to do at every duty post where he had enjoyed the requisite authority. He not infrequently tapped the spooks’ phone lines, patched into their back channel transmissions, suborned their local operatives, or even stole their typewriter and cable-printer ribbons from the burn bag and held them up to mirrors to read them. More often, he did the less exotic, more tedious things that produce most real intelligence: observing whom the spooks lunched with, analyzing their purchase orders, tracking curious patterns in their personnel assignments and so forth. He’d stopped short at breaking into their embassy precincts and burgling their desks and file cabinets—he wouldn’t have known how and, anyway, he never had to.
    He was good enough at this that he ultimately spent seven years of his career in charge of the Interagency Liaison and Assessment Bureau, an office he had created for the purpose of generalizing his approach.
    Michaelson made it a point to share the information he obtained. He shared it with his superiors, of course, but also with those of the people’s elected representatives who weren’t on the payrolls of foreign powers, knew how to keep their mouths shut when reporters were around, and had a decent shot at being president some day. The last criterion suggested to some that Michaelson wasn’t wholly motivated in his disclosures by an idealistic commitment to democratic governance. He wasn’t—but then, nothing in Washington is ever entirely unambiguous.

Chapter Four
    As these events were taking place, the afternoon routine in Honor Cottage B-4 of the United States Minimum Security Correctional Facility near Fritchieburg, Maryland, was just getting underway.
    Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Wesson Smith was preparing to leave the Building Security Office and take a walk through the Honor Cottage. (Honor Cottage B-4 didn’t look anything like a cottage. It had a ground floor and a basement and was about the size and shape of a quonset hut—which, come to think of it, doesn’t look anything like a hut.) He turned to the television monitor on his desk and flipped at random through the six closed-circuit video cameras in the building. Finding nothing worthy of note, he stepped in front of the full-length mirror bolted to the rear wall and looked himself over.
    He saw razor-sharp creases on his light-brown-with-loden-green-trim uniform shirt and slacks, a gleaming brass buckle on his green web belt and shoes polished to a dazzling shine. Retired after twenty years in the Army, he was now seven years into his second career, with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Satisfied, he opened the door and stepped out of his office.
    This was at the front of the building, on the ground floor. At the back of the building, in the basement, inmate Larry Stepanski had just used a plastic card key to unlock the Supply Room. He led his fellow B-4 inmates inside to give them the things they’d need to do the work assigned to them that afternoon.
    â€œLet’s see,” Stepanski said in a blast furnace voice as he consulted a clipboard, “whadda you got today, Counsellor