Free The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey Page B

study and a good listener. He deduced from remarks made by one of the secretaries in the office that TRW had a different job in mind for him eventually, but nobody would give him the details when he brought up the subject.
    Early in November, TRW received a classified message from the CIA. It said that Christopher John Boyce had been cleared for a Special Projects Briefing.
    On November 15, he was summoned to Building M-4, and for the first time he heard about Project Rhyolite and the Black Vault.

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    â€œRhyolite is a multipurpose covert electronic surveillance system.…”
    Chris’s head felt ready to burst. His muscles tingled, and every neuron in his body was supersensitized to what was happening around him. Before leaving home he had swallowed two amphetamine tablets. “Whites” had been a casual element of his life since high school. But lately he wasn’t using pep pills only to get high; he needed them to stay awake. Without the pills, he couldn’t keep alert after a long night of tending bar. His moonlighting job was becoming more and more tiresome; some nights he spent more time breaking up fights among the customers than he did drawing glasses of beer for them.
    That morning, he had been told that he was being given another assignment and would have to undergo a special briefing for the new position. He had been instructed to report to Section 1986 in Building M-4—a building conspicuously off limits to most TRW employees. Situated between a big expanse of parking lots and rolling green parkland, the M-4 complex consisted of a low, mint-green-colored building and a towering concrete-gray annex topped by one of those big white igloos that mystified Chris.
    He was about to discover what was under the igloo.
    He obtained a special pass to show at two guard checkpoints before reaching Section 1986, a cluster of offices in M-4. The briefing began, 54 Chris struggled to dampen the drug-induced sense of euphoria. The briefing officer was Larry Rogers, whose comings and goings around the plant had had a quality of mystery; something to do with a classified project.
    In a voice that lowered noticeably as he began, Rogers told Chris that the work in this section of the plant involved secret projects, and he explained that Chris had been specially cleared by the government to work on them.
    Chris, noticing what he thought was a curious glint of suspicion in Rogers’ eyes, wondered if Rogers knew he was high; he tried to look straight ahead and concentrate.
    Rogers ordered Chris never to discuss with anyone the briefing he was about to give; never to divulge to anyone the existence of the projects of which he was about to hear, or discuss with anyone the kind of work he was to do; and never to mention to anyone not cleared for the projects their code names or the fact that they were clandestine operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.
    In fact, he ordered, never mention to anyone—his family, his girlfriends, any outsiders—that the CIA had any relationship whatsoever with TRW, or that his salary was being paid by the CIA under a contract with TRW. What the hell is he talking about? Chris wondered.
    Rogers then introduced Chris to what he called “the black world.…”
    Orbiting satellites, he went on, were to a large extent taking over much of the work of human spies for the United States. And, he continued, TRW was one of a handful of American companies in the business of developing and manufacturing the satellites used by the CIA to collect secret intelligence information from space. Chris, he said, had been selected to serve on the team that operated some of these satellites.…
    Chris had stumbled into one of the most secret of all American espionage operations—an invisible intelligence bureaucracy supervised from the White House by the National Security Council and entrusted with the responsibility to ferret out and analyze secrets about the Soviet