Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights:#1 The Blue Ridge Mountains, Maryland, August 21, 1997. I was waiting anxiously on the concrete observation deck of the sweltering airport terminal, peering down at the tarmac through a thickening haze. The TWA flight from Bangkok was two hours late. I had to make sure that the subject and his CIA escort officer Jacob safely boarded the plane.#2 I have considered myself an artist since childhood. I have also seen myself as a competent spy since 1990, when I retired after a twenty-five-year espionage career in the CIA. In 1997, I was living a normal life with my wife, Jonna, and our four-year-old son, Jesse.#3 I had been selected as a CIA Trailblazer, and I was honored by the Agency with a bronze Intelligence Star. I had been destined from childhood for a career in the shadow world of espionage.#4 I was born in Eureka, Nevada, in 1940. My father, John G. Mendez, was hired at the Kimberly copper mine in 1943, and he died three weeks before my third birthday. My grandparents, Joseph R. Tognoni and Ina Bell Cates, eloped in Goldfield in 1916.