Garland Whitacre

Garland Whitacre is 56 and spent twenty-five of those years at the Bureau, fifteen hunting Soviets. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a coal miner and a church cleaner, he studied with the Jesuits on scholarship and left with the bearing of someone apologizing for taking up space. Today he is a computer security supervisor, and he retires in April.

He lives in a two-story brick house in a Washington suburb, with six children in private school and a kitchen that smells of burnt toast at six in the morning. He goes to the 6:30 Mass every day, before anything else, and reaches work at 7:30. He leaves at 5, which colleagues describe as the only fixed point in the Bureau. On weekends he takes the family to the same Italian restaurant and always orders the same dish.

He is tall and stoop-shouldered, with a long, pale face, black hair combed back with gel and thick eyebrows that almost meet when he frowns. He wears a dark three-piece suit with a burgundy tie, and lets a string of black rosary beads show in his jacket pocket. He speaks softly, with a polite contempt for colleagues that never turns to rudeness, and dislikes being touched or interrupted.

About the case, his account is that of a man with a clean record: twenty-five years on the job, retirement in sight, nothing to hide. He was on the team when the bag was found and, when asked who had access to the list, he names the assistant, who stayed late on both days of the log, and his brother-in-law, who walks every day in the same park. He says he doesn't find anything: the facts do.

Garland knows the man in charge of computer security is the first one anyone looks at when a list goes missing. When the detective calls him a traitor to his face, his voice stays low but turns icy, he recalls his twenty-five years at the Bureau and speaks of turning to a lawyer. It could be the wounded pride of a devout man who was never treated as a defendant. It could be someone praying that no one looks deeper. The detective will have to decide which.