"SO, RECOVER FROM yesterday?" Ryan asked Harding. It was the first time he'd beaten his workmate into the office.

"Yes, I suppose I have."

"If it makes you feel any better, I haven't met the President yet, myself. And I'm not exactly looking forward to the experience. Like Mark Twain said about the guy who got himself tarred and feathered, if it weren't for the honor of the thing, he would just as soon have missed it."

Harding managed a brief laugh. "Precisely, Jack. One does go a little weak in the knees."

"Is she as tough as they say?"

"I'm not sure I'd want to play rugger against her. She's also very, very bright. Doesn't miss a thing, and asks bloody good questions."

"Well, answering them is what they pay us for, Simon," Ryan pointed out. There was no sense being afraid of people who were only doing their job as well, and who needed good information to do it properly.

"And her, too, Jack. She has to do questions in Parliament."

"On this sort of thing?" Jack asked, surprised.

"No, not this. It's occasionally discussed with the opposition, but under strict rules."

"You worry about leaks?" Jack asked, wondering. In America, there were select committees whose members were thoroughly briefed on what they could say and what they could not. The Agency did worry about leaks—they were politicians, after all—but he'd never heard of a serious one off The Hill. Those more often came from inside the Agency, and mainly from the Seventh Floor… or from the White House's West Wing. That didn't mean that CIA was comfortable with leaks of any kind, but at least these were more often than not sanctioned, and often they were disinformation with a political purpose behind them. It was probably the same here, especially since the local news media operated under controls that would have given The New York Times a serious conniption fit.

"One always wonders about them, Jack. So, anything new come in last night?"

"Nothing new on the Pope," Ryan reported. "Our sources, such as they are, have run into a brick wall. Will you be turning your field spooks loose?"

"Yes, the PM made it clear to Basil that she wants more information. If something happens to His Holiness, well—"

"—she blows a head gasket, right?"

"You Americans do have a way with words, Jack. And your President?"

"He'll be seriously pissed, and by that I do not mean hitting the booze. His dad was Catholic, and his mom raised him a Protestant, but he wouldn't be real happy if the Pope so much as catches a late-summer cold."

"You know, even if we turn some information, it is not at all certain that we'll be able to do a thing with it."

"I kinda figured that, but at least we can say something to his protective detail. We can do that much, and maybe he can change his schedule—no, he won't. He'd rather take the bullet like a man. But maybe we can interfere somehow with what the Bad Guys are planning. You just can't know until you have a few facts to rub together. But that's not really our job, is it?"

Harding shook his head, as he stirred his morning tea. "No, the field officers feed it to us, and we try to determine what it means."

"Frustrating?" Ryan wondered. Harding had been at the job much longer than he had.

"Frequently. I know the field officers sweat blood doing their jobs—and it can be physically dangerous to the ones who do not have a 'legal' cover—but we users of information can't always see it from their perspective. As a result, they do not appreciate us as much as we appreciate them. I've met with a few of them over the years, and they are good chaps, but it's a clash of cultures, Jack."

The field guys are probably pretty good at analysis themselves, when you get down to it, Ryan thought. I wonder how often the analyst community really appreciates that? It was something for Ryan to slip into his mental do-not-forget file. The Agency was supposed to be one big happy team, after all. Of course it wasn't, even at the Seventh Floor level.

"Anyway, we had this come in from East Germany." Jack handed the folder across. "Some rumbles in their political hierarchy last week."

"Those bloody Prussians," Harding breathed, as he took it and flipped to the first page.

"Cheer up. The Russians don't much like them either."

"I don't blame them a bit."