The Mark of the Assassin

officer--intelligence, leadership
    skills, charisma, attitude, and the ability to speak several languages.
    What the professor did not know was that Michael's father had worked in
    the clandestine service and that Michael and his mother had followed him
    from posting to posting. He could speak five languages by the time he
    was sixteen. When the Agency came for him the first time, he turned them
    down. He had seen what the job had done to his father, and he had seen
    the toll it had taken on his mother. But the Agency wanted him, and it
    kept trying. He finally agreed after graduation, because he had no job
    prospects and no better ideas. He was sent to Camp Perry, the CIA
    training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia, known as the Farm.
    There he learned how to recruit and run agents. He learned the art of
    clandestine communication. He learned how to spot enemy surveillance. He
    learned the martial arts and defensive driving. After a year of training
    he was supplied with a cover identity and an Agency pseudonym and given
    a simple assignment: Penetrate the world's most violent terror
    organizations.
    MICHAEL DROVE ALONG Route 123, turned onto the George Washington
    Parkway, and headed toward the city. The road was deserted. The tall
    trees on either side twisted in the gusty wind, and a bright moon shone
    through broken clouds. Reflexively, he checked his mirror several times
    to make certain he was not being followed. He pressed the accelerator;
    the speedometer showed seventy. The Jaguar rose and fell over the gentle
    landscape. The trees opened to his left, and the Potomac sparkled in the
    moonlight. After a few minutes the spires of Georgetown appeared. He
    took the Key Bridge exit and crossed the river into Washington.
    M Street was deserted, just a few homeless men drinking in Key Park and
    a knot of Georgetown students talking on the sidewalk outside the local
    Kinko's. He turned left on 33rd Street. The bright lights and shops of M
    Street vanished behind him. The house had a private parking space in the
    back, reached by a narrow alley, but Michael preferred to leave his car
    on the street in plain view. He turned left onto N Street and found a
    spot; then, as was his habit, he watched the front of the house for a
    moment before shutting down the motor. Michael enjoyed being a case
    officer--the seduction of a good recruitment, the payoff of a timely
    piece of intelligence but this was the part of the job he didn't like,
    the gnawing anxiety he felt every time he entered his own home, the fear
    his enemies would finally take their revenge. Michael had always lived
    with an element of personal risk because of the way he did his job. In
    the lexicon of the CIA, he was a NOC, the Agency acronym for nonofficial
    cover. It meant that instead of working out of an embassy, with a State
    Department cover, like most operations officers, Michael was on his own.
    He had been a business major at Dartmouth, and his cover usually
    involved international consulting or sales. Michael preferred it that
    way. Most of the CIA officers operating from an embassy were known to
    the other side. That made conducting the business of espionage all the
    more difficult, especially when the target was a terrorist organization.
    Michael didn't have the albatross of the embassy hanging around his
    neck, but he also didn't have it for protection. If an officer operating
    under official cover got into trouble, he could always run to the
    embassy and claim diplomatic immunity. If Michael got into trouble--if a
    recruitment went bad or the opposing service learned the true nature of
    his work--he could be thrown in jail or worse. The anxiety had receded
    gently after so many years at headquarters, but it never really left
    him. His overwhelming fear was that his enemies would go after the thing
    he cared about most. They had done it before. He climbed out of the car,
    locked it, and set the alarm. He walked west to 34th Street, examining
    the cars, checking the tags. At 34th he crossed the street and did the
    same on the other side. Curved brick steps rose from the sidewalk to the
    front door of their wide Federal-style house. Michael used to be
    sensitive about living in a two-million-dollar Georgetown home; most of
    his colleagues lived in the less-expensive Virginia suburbs around
    Langley. They kidded him relentlessly about his lavish home and his car,
    wondering aloud whether Michael had gone the way of Rick Ames and was
    selling