She thought it over for a minute and then decided to accept. She typed in her reply and logged off. She would receive a more thorough dossier within several hours. The next call was to her travel agent to book a ticket and check the availability of the company's apartment in Manhattan. With that accomplished, she set about clearing her schedule for the remainder of the week. Donatella Rahn was indeed a very complicated woman.

IT WAS RAINING, and the Wednesday morning temperature was a chilly fifty-two degrees. Kennedy's sedan drove east on Independence Avenue. Traffic was thick, as the deluge of government employees scrambled to make it to their desks by nine. The sedan rolled past the Air and Space Museum and then crossed 4th Street. Kennedy looked out the window at the throngs of people huddled under umbrellas waiting for the light to change. Normally, she would have brought something to work on during the ride from Langley to the Hill, but she had forced herself not to. She needed to straighten some things out in her head.

The only good piece of news since Saturday was that Mitch was alive. She could have done without his dramatic reappearance and his skepticism in regard to her loyalty, but, as he had pointed out, she wasn't the one who had been shot. Mitch was a different breed, and Kennedy had always respected that. He operated much closer to the edge than she ever would or could. He had once again proven that his level of skill was bewildering. With no help whatsoever, he had made it out of Germany and back to the United States, where he then broke into the CIA director's house and in the process also broke the jaw of the CIA employee who was there to make sure such a thing never happened.

When Rapp finally settled down, they filled him in on what lime they knew. He in turn had asked a lot of questions for which they had almost no answers. The situation was dismal, Rapp was disgusted, and Kennedy was embarrassed. Rapp, never one to pull a punch, had placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the director of the Counterterrorism Center and Stansfield, telling them, «You've got a leak, and if you don't find it, I'll find it for you.»

Kennedy already knew she had a leak, but in the current political climate, the last thing she needed was Mitch Rapp running around Washington banging people's heads together. To Kennedy's consternation, Stansfield had actually encouraged Rapp to find the leak, but in her opinion, it was time to let Mitch take a long vacation. With the chairman watching like a hawk, she didn't need Rapp drawing unneeded attention to himself, and ultimately her – no matter how good he was.

What Stansfield had neglected to tell Kennedy was his real reason for wanting to turn their bull loose in the china shop. His doctor had told hint the day before that the cancer was progressing much faster than anticipated. And indeed, he could feel it eating away at his insides. Each day was a little worse. It was no longer an issue of months but weeks. He needed to put things in order before he passed. He needed to find out who was behind the recent events. Rapp had been the target in Germany, but something told the old director that whoever was behind this move had a much bigger target in mind than Rapp. There wasn't enough time left for subtlety, only results, and if there was one thing Rapp was exceptional at, it was getting results.

The government sedan passed the Sam Rayburn House Office Building. The four-story behemoth was named in honor of Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn, the congressman from Texas who had served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1912 to 1961. The people of Texas had sent Rayburn to Washington a staggering twenty-five times. From 1940 until his death in 1961, Rayburn served as speaker of the house seventeen times. During that time, very little happened in Washington without Sam Rayburn's approval. Chairman Rudin had an office inside the Rayburn Building, but he spent most of his time in a second office on the top floor of the Capitol. He liked to refer to it as his eagle's nest. Max Salmen, the CIA's deputy director of Operations, called it the vulture's lair. Rudin didn't like this one bit, but that, of course, was Salmen's intent. In recent: years, Salmen had stated that his sole mission before retirement was to drive Rudin insane. At first, Kennedy wondered why Stansfield tolerated this, and then it dawned on her that the more Rudin focused his hatred on Salmen, the less he would have left over for die rest of die Agency; She wished that were die case this morning.

The sedan pulled up to a checkpoint manned by die Capitol Hill police. After a brief inspection, they were waved through. Kennedy was dropped off near the ground-floor entrance on die southeast side of the building. She stepped from the car and opened her umbrella. With her leather organizer in her other hand, she walked through the rain and entered the huge neoclassical building, where she lined up to go through the metal detectors. Most of the ground floor of the Capitol was occupied by committee rooms and offices and was not accessible to die general public without a pass. The areas that were accessible tended to be located in the middle of the building and included the Hall of Columns, the Old Supreme Court Chamber, and die Brumidi Corridors. The south wing of the building held the House of Representatives, and the north wing held the Senate. On the second floor were the chambers for both the House and the Senate, along with offices for leadership of both bodies. The Capitol's most identifiable feature, its rotunda, was also on the second floor. The third floor had more committee rooms and offices and the galleries from which visitors could watch the House and the Senate in action. All three of these floors were immaculately maintained.

Kennedy was headed to the fourth floor, which she often thought of as the neglected child of the Capitol. The offices there were far less glamorous, the paint was chipping in places, and water stains on the ceiling were not uncommon. Visitors rarely glimpsed the fourth floor, which was one of the reasons it was chosen as the location for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Kennedy walked past Office H-405, which housed the committee's staffers. She opened a door a little farther down and stepped into a tiny waiting area.

There were two people in the room: a staffer sitting behind a reception desk and a Capitol Hill Police officer. The staffer greeted her and told her to take a seat. He picked up the phone and told someone on the other end that Dr. Kennedy had arrived. The man listened for a few seconds and then hung up. Looking at Kennedy, he said, «It'll be a few minutes.»

Kennedy nodded and thought to herself, I'm sure it will. Chairman Rudin was notorious for making CIA employees wait. Kennedy checked her watch. It was 8:56. They'd told her to be there by nine. She would be shocked if she was called in before a quarter past nine. She was right. At 9:24, she was summoned to the inner chamber. The committee room was the smallest in Washington. There was no gallery – no room for reporters to sit and listen. The sixteen members – eight Democrats, seven Republicans, and one independent – sat ten feet in front of the witness table in two rows. There were chairs for staffers behind the top row, and on the wall were the thirteen seals of the government agencies that made up the intelligence community, or IC.

Like the committee room for the Senate, this was also a room within a room. Highly secure, it was swept by technicians from the National Security Agency on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, depending on the business that was being conducted.

Kennedy set her organizer on the table and looked up to see Michael O'Rourke coming toward her. The congressman from Minnesota was the lone independent on the committee. O'Rourke said hello and asked Kennedy how her son was doing. After their pleasantries were concluded, O'Rourke said, «Irene, I need you to be honest with me about something.»