Too many meetings that accomplished nothing, and more often than not, created more red tape and hassles for the people who were on the front lines doing the important work. The meetings were a colossal waste of energy and resources. They never started on time and they always ran over, and that was the least of their problems. Now that he was on the inside, after spending more than a decade abroad working covertly for the CIA, he could see why so many in Washington thought the Agency had dropped the ball.

The Agency had become the antithesis of what Colonel Wild Bill Donovan, its founder, had designed it to be. It was a risk-averse haven for bureaucrats to put in their time so they could retire and collect their pensions. Sensitivity training and diversity workshops had taken priority over recruiting case officers with foreign language skills who had the chutzpah it took to run covert ops.

Thanks to Aldrich Ames, the FBI had been invited to join the Agency's Counter Intelligence Center. The brothers in dark suits had eviscerated the ranks of Langley 's few remaining good case officers, for the simple reason that too many of the men and women in the directorate of operations were mavericks. Never mind that mavericks, independent thinkers, were exactly who Wild Bill Donovan and President Roosevelt had in mind when they started the Office of Strategic Services at the onset of World War II. Donovan and Roosevelt understood that you didn't hire decent, respectable, risk-averse family men to spy on the enemy. You hired risk-takers who were willing to put their lives on the line to get a piece of information that might make the difference.

It was not a business for the meek, buttoned-up type. It was a business for daredevils who liked to gamble.

Signal and photographic intelligence now replaced eyes and ears on the ground. The billion-dollar satellites and ground intercept and relay stations were clean. They couldn't embarrass you the way a turned case officer could. They didn't bleed, they couldn't be kidnapped, they didn't lie and Congress loved them. The bright glossy photographs of terrorist training camps and scratchy audio intercepts of our enemies plotting to strike gave them great satisfaction.

The politicians marveled at America 's technological superiority.

There was one big problem, though; the enemy knew they were being watched and listened to, and went to great lengths to hide what they were doing from the big prying eyes and ears in the sky.

Everyone in Washington knew this, but it didn't stop groups like the State Department from pushing for more signal intelligence. The alternative was putting real men and women in the field and that could be very messy. Uncontrollable CIA case officers were a constant source of irritation for the State Department. They snooped around host countries, tended to drink too much, tried to recruit agents and generally behaved in a way that no gentleman or lady from Foggy Bottom would endorse. Even worse, if they got caught, the host country would expel innocent State Department employees along with the offending CIA case officer and the whole affair would upset the delicate dance of diplomacy.

The CIA had become just another Washington bureaucracy. A money-sucking black hole of political correctness. In short, the CIA was a reflection of the times and its political leaders. Now Rapp truly understood why Director Stansfield had done what he did. The recently deceased director of the Agency had fought hard to insulate the CIA from the political whims of Capitol Hill, but it was a Herculean task that no one man could perform. Seeing the winds of change approaching, Stansfield had created a covert counterterrorism unit known as the Orion Team. The group's mission was to operate in the dark and take the battle to the terrorists. Mitch Rapp had been the tip of that spear for the better part of a decade. He'd killed more men for his country than he could count, and he had come close to losing his own life more times than he dared to remember.

For the last several years he'd seriously considered getting out. Instinctively, he knew that one of these times, no matter how good he was, the breaks wouldn't go his way and he'd end up dead. The decision to make the move was finalized when he'd met Anna Rielly. She was only the second woman he'd ever loved, and the first had been a long time ago. Soon after meeting her he knew she was the one. It was time to get out of the killing business and get on with a normal life.

That had all been before the towers and the Pentagon were hit.

Now he wasn't so sure. An anger burned inside him. He knew the face of the enemy better than perhaps anyone in the country. It was the hideous face of Islamic fanaticism. It had taken all the restraint he could muster to not get on a plane and go over to Afghanistan.

Kennedy had convinced him not to. He was too important. She needed him right at her side, using his language skills and contacts in the region to run down leads and try to figure out what had happened.

Kennedy had vision, just like her mentor. She could see the goals of the competing agencies and interests in Washington and maneuver her way through the minefield. She knew that in the wake of 9/11 the politicians on the Hill would try to pin the whole thing on the CIA.

Never mind that beginning with the Church Hearings in the mid-seventies, it was the politicians who had pulled the CIA out of the spying business.

Then, in the eighties, it was the politicians again who told the CIA to break off any association with nefarious individuals, ignoring the fact that to catch the bad guys you actually had to talk to them and their associates from time to time. But the politicians on the Hill didn't want to hear any of it. The CIA either had to bat a thousand or get out of the hood. So ultimately, the politicians got exactly what they wanted. They created an agency that was afraid to take risks.

How could they have known in 1922, when Great Britain created the new country of Transjordan, that one day its capital of Amman would grow into a city of international intrigue? Amman, a city of over a million souls, was a dusty old town that had been cleaned up and dragged into the twenty-first century by the forward thinking King Hussein I and his son Abdullah II. Bordered to the east and south by Iraq and Saudi Arabia, to the north by Syria and to the west by Israel, Jordan was a cursed piece of land that was poor in mineral and oil deposits and plentiful in refugees. Palestinians, to be precise, and lots of them. For the first thirty or so years after the formation of Israel, Jordan moved in lock step with her Arab neighbors in calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state. But after getting decisively trounced in every military engagement with their Zionist neighbors Jordan began to think of Israel as a dog that was better left undisturbed, at least as far as outright wars were concerned.

If being cursed with a worthless piece of land wasn't enough, Jordan had to contend with a cast of neighbors that included the Middle East 's most notorious despot, the ultra wealthy and schizophrenic Saudi royal family and the Syrians, who for various twisted religious reasons hated the Jordanians almost as much as they hated the Jews. With no real resources or industry to build an economy, Jordan from its inception was dependent on foreign aid. At first it was the Brits, then the Arab League and then with the promise of better relations with Israel, the United States began to infuse millions of dollars in humanitarian, economic and military aid into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.