traffic on the parkway like he had done often just before he was off to the badlands somewhere. A time to reflect, to consider his options and even his reasons for going. He’d never considered himself to be a Don Quixote, and yet at times, he knew that was exactly the figure he cut for some people, like the current deputy director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and a few deputy directors before him. One had called Mac an anachronism, a man whom time had passed by. Another said he was a criminal. A president a few years back had charged him with treason. “If it wasn’t that people have a tendency of turning up dead, you’d almost be a clown,” a national security adviser to that president had told him. “You called me,” Mac had countered. “Why?” someone else had asked. “It’s who I am,” Mac had told him, and that answer hadn’t set right even in his own ears. Yet it was probably the nearest thing to the truth that was possible to know. Of all the women in his life who to his way of thinking had died because of him, he missed Katy the most.
