Hazardous Duty

The first thing Roscoe thought when called upon was that he had fallen asleep, and the President, seeing this, had seen it as an opportunity to embarrass him. Clendennen liked to embarrass people, and did so often.

Roscoe thought it was entirely possible that he had dozed off. He was not in the briefing room to make notes on what the President would say but rather because it was one of the very few places in Washington where Miss Eleanor Dillworth could not follow him.

Miss Dillworth, who brought to her stalking techniques her twenty-seven years experience in the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been lurking in a dark corner of the bar in the Old Ebbitt Grill on Fifteenth Street, N.W. around the corner from the White House at noon when Roscoe had entered for his breakfast Bloody Mary.

He managed to make it to the White House press conference safely, thus sparing himself from being presented with yet another cornucopia of unpleasant revelations vis-à-vis the CIA Miss Dillworth wanted to bring to the attention of the American people via Roscoe s columns, which were published in more than three hundred newspapers in the United States and around the world.

Miss Dillworth, Roscoe had learned some months ago when he first met her, was a disgruntled former employee who had been relieved of her position as CIA station chief in Vienna, Austria and later fired for bungling the defection of two very senior officers of the SVR the Russian Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System, renamed from KGB.

Since meeting Miss Dillworth, and becoming close he often thought much too uncomfortably close to others involved in the incident, Roscoe had come to the conclusion that the facts were not quite as she presented them and that she royally deserved getting the boot from the CIA.

But, surprising Roscoe not at all there was a former Mrs. Roscoe Danton who was also highly intelligent, strong-willed, and found it impossible to accept that she could ever do anything wrong even if the facts clearly proved otherwise Miss Dillwo