Free Support and Defend by Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney

even though he had settled down much in the past few years and rooted himself firmly to the D.C. area, he still liked to get together with other current and former globe-trotting reporters at the monthly breakfast.
    The meeting broke up at ten a.m., and soon after Harlan climbed into his nine-year-old Volkswagen and made the drive down to his one-room office in a high-rise on K Street, deep in the District’s downtown Golden Triangle. He had a morning of phone calls ahead before he had to head back out to lunch with old colleagues at The Washington Post .
    Banfield’s career began working the city beat for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the seventies. He served in New York with UPI in the eighties, before finally taking work as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post . He was based in Europe and the Middle East, primarily, but he was both an excellent journalist and a single man without a family, so he was sent to all the hot spots for twenty years before returning to D.C. to work at the Post ’s office on 15th Street in the twilight of his career.
    Banfield was sixty-six now, but he had not retired. He still did some freelance work around town, writing mostly for various electronic media outlets.
    In addition to his work for hire, Banfield also authored a blog about D.C. lobbyists from a decidedly anti–D.C. lobbyist perspective. His blog got him some small attention inside the Beltway, but he wasn’t doing it for the mainstream, because Banfield’s blog, like his sporadic freelance work, was, by and large, a front.
    In truth, Harlan Banfield was much more than a journalist. He was also the U.S. liaison of an organization that called itself the International Transparency Project. The ITP’s website put their mission statement succinctly, identifying the group as a loose worldwide consortium of philanthropists, journalists, lawyers, and activists who endeavored to support government openness and accountability. They did this by seeking out, encouraging, funding, and protecting whistleblowers.
    The homepage of the ITP’s website displayed a picture of a sunrise over Washington, D.C., with the phrase “Truth vs. Power” in bold type above it. There was something telling about having D.C. on the homepage of the website. The organization was—ostensibly, anyway—designed to expose government malfeasance in every country on the globe, but in truth, ITP focused the vast bulk of its efforts on what it saw as the evil empire, the United States of America.
    Banfield didn’t hate America, though he thought it probable some of his foreign colleagues in the ITP did. Banfield just liked a good story, and nothing gave him a bigger thrill than unveiling closely guarded secrets. High-level government leaks were the coin of the realm around Washington, and Harlan Banfield loved serving as a clandestine clearinghouse for the biggest leaks in the Beltway.
    Banfield felt there existed in the U.S. a Deep State, a shadow government, wealthy and well-connected members of industry who were the true power behind the scenes. And working as the U.S. liaison to the ITP was his way of peeling off the superficial layers of government secrecy, in hopes of someday digging deep enough to find the truth about this shadow government.
    He wasn’t in it for any attention—members of the Project did not reveal their identities to the world at large. It was an attempt to minimize exposure to government surveillance, and in Banfield’s case, it had worked. As far as most people knew, he was just an aging foreign correspondent who’d long since been put to pasture, but he loved unlocking the secure doors around D.C.
    He pulled into his building’s underground garage a little before eleven a.m. It had started to drizzle, and he was glad to have a dedicated spot under cover. He’d just locked his Volkswagen and began walking toward the elevator, when he sensed a figure in the dark on his left moving between the cars along the wall of the