The Director: A Novel by David Ignatius Read Free Book Online Page A

to oppose what she regarded as illegal surveillance.
    Late that afternoon, Ramona Kyle met her old Stanford classmate James Morris. She had messaged him through an email account they had shared since graduate school. She proposed that they rendezvous at the Antietam National Battlefield, a few miles south of where she was staying. It was an anonymous enough destination, the sort any tourist would visit. Morris drove his Prius up I-270 from his apartment in Dupont Circle, and Kyle took a taxi from her inn in Boonsboro.
    They met on the walkway that skirted the battlefield monuments. Morris was wearing a cardigan sweater and jeans, and his favorite pair of hiking boots. His hair was blowing in the afternoon breeze, and he looked almost handsome. Kyle appeared half his size, cloaked in a bulky wool turtleneck that obscured the shape of her body. Her frizzy red hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a cap with the words ASTON VILLA , which was the name of her favorite soccer team, a sport she followed passionately.
    It was flat ground, fields and orchards framed by the Blue Ridge in the distance, a natural arena in which two armies might collide. The humble white brick church around which the battle had been fought stood just beyond them on a rise. Kyle was wearing dark glasses and scarcely looked up from the walkway.
    They immediately fell into intense conversation, as if they were taking up the thread of a dialogue that had been momentarily interrupted. They walked close together, the spindly man occasionally bumping into the tiny woman, each of them stopping suddenly to make a particular point. Ramona Kyle famously had no friends at Stanford save one, James Morris, and she seemed to shed her shyness and disdain for people when he was present. She was the only child of a brilliant, reclusive composer, and she treated Morris much as if he were the brother she didn’t have. Morris, who also lived in a world where he had few close friends or intellectual equals, reciprocated the intimacy. He called her “K” and she called him “Jimmy,” names they used with no one else.
    “How do you survive it?” Kyle said after they had been talking for a time about Morris’s life in Washington. By “it” she meant all the aspects of government that she found repellent.
    “I multitask,” he answered. “The right hand doesn’t talk to the left hand, but the juggler never drops the ball.”
    “You scare me,” she said. “You’re such a good . . . spy.”
    They walked on toward the obelisks and pillars that marked the battle that had been fought on this ground on September 17, 1862. Ramona had seemed oblivious of the surroundings, but now she spoke up.
    “Do you know how many people died here, Jimmy? It was twenty-three thousand, counting both sides. That’s the most people that were killed in one day in any battle, ever, anywhere.”
    She took his hand and pulled him to a stop.
    “Close your eyes and you can see the bodies. They’re heaped up, one on top of the other. They’re pleading for water. They want someone to come and shoot them dead, it hurts so much. That’s what war is. Don’t forget that.”
    “I don’t,” said Morris.
    Kyle still had her eyes closed, smelling death in her nostrils. She took off her dark glasses and looked him full in the face.
    “Listen to me, Jimmy: It was five days after Antietam when Lincoln issued the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Do you know why? I think it’s because it had to mean something, all this suffering. There was no turning back. It’s the same for you. You can’t stop now.”
    “I know.”
    Her voice fell. She took his hand.
    “Did you bring me anything?”
    “Yes,” he said. He took a thumb drive out of the pocket of his jeans and, in one invisible motion, put it in her open palm, which closed around it. She thrust the hand into her own pocket under the bulky sweater.
    “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said. “He can