Blaine said, looking around. “I got another one at State, a little bigger. Sometimes I forget where I am, have to figure out which receptionist’s voice it is coming over the intercom.” “You ready to tell me who you figure Jack Tyrell was working for?” Belgrade looked away briefly. “The phrase Black Flag mean anything to you?” “No.” “I need to tell you how this government runs? There’s light and dark; light that everybody thinks they see and dark that most can’t see. Then there’s operations like Black Flag that nobody’s allowed to see.” “That include you?” “That includes everybody, MacNuts, and with good reason. Black Flag got its start in the heyday of covert ops. We were ready to flush Vietnam down the toilet, and the Cold War was about as frigid as it ever got. Intelligence wasn’t about to let us lose another war or let the Soviets expand westward through Europe one block at a time. They had a free hand to do pretty much anything they wanted, so long as participation could be easily denounced later.”
