“It’s greatly appreciated, Evan. Stop in and see me before you leave. I’ll be in my office.”
The Vice President of the United States left the book-lined room, and like jackals descending on their prey, the contributors turned to the congressman from Colorado. “We level now, son,” said the six-foot-five yachtsman, his arm on the mantel like a leaning, angry weed.
“I’m not a relative of yours, thank you, and I resent the familiarity.”
“Big Tom always talks like that,” chimed in the Bostonian. “He don’t mean no harm by it.”
“The harm is in his presumption with a member of the House of Representatives.”
“Oh, come on, Congressman!” interjected the obese man in the navy blue blazer.
“Let’s all relax,” said the small-framed, pinched-faced man sitting down in the overlarge armchair. “We’re all here for the same purpose, and courtesies aside, let’s get on with it.… We want you out, Kendrick. Do we have to be clearer?”
“Since you’re so adamant, I think you’d better be.”
“All right,” continued the short contributor, his legs barely touching the carpeted floor. “As someone said, let’s be honest—doesn’t cost a damn thing.… We represent a political philosophy every bit as legitimate as you think yours is, but because it’s ours we naturally feel it’s more realistic for the times. Basically, we believe in a far stronger defense-oriented system of priorities than you do for the country.”
“I believe in a strong defense, too,” broke in Evan. “But not in budget-crippling, excessively offensive systems where forty percent of the expenditures result in waste and ineffectiveness.”
“Good point,” agreed Kendrick’s undersized opponent from the large chair. “And these areas of procurement will be rectified by the marketplace.”
“But not until billions are spent.”
“Naturally. If it were otherwise, you’re talking about another system of government that doesn’t permit the Malthusian law of economic failure. The forces of the free market will correct those excesses.
Competition, Congressman Kendrick. Competition.”
“Not if they’re rigged in the Pentagon or in those boardrooms where there are too many alumni from the Defense Department.”
“Hell!” exclaimed the yachtsman from the fireplace mantel. “If they’re that fucking obvious, let ’em hang!”
“Big Tom’s right,” said the florid-faced Bostonian. “There’s plenty to go around, and those nickel-and-dime colonels and generals are just lubrication, anyway. Get rid of them if you like, but don’t stop the treadmill, for Christ’s sake!”
“Do you hear that?” asked the gold-buttoned blue blazer. “Don’t stop until we’re so strong no Soviet leader would even think about a strike.”
“Why do you think any of them would consider it, consider blowing up a large part of the civilized world?”
“Because they’re Marxist fanatics!” roared the yachtsman, standing erect in front of the mantel, his arms akimbo.
“Because they’re stupid,” corrected the short man from his chair calmly. “Stupidity is the basic road to global tragedy, which means the strongest and the smartest will survive.… We can handle our critics in the Senate and the House, Congressman, but not in the administration. That we can’t tolerate. Am I clear?”
“You really think I’m a threat to you?”
“Of course you are. You get on your soapbox and people listen, and what you say—very effectively, I might add—is not in our interests.”
“I thought you had such respect for the marketplace.”
“I do in the long run, but in the short run excessive oversight and regulation can cripple the country’s defense with delays. This is no time to throw the baby out with the bath water.”
“Which means throwing away profits.”
“They go with the job, as you so rightly explained regarding the office of Vice President.… Go your way, Congressman. Rebuild your aborted career in Southwest Asia.”
“With what?” asked Evan.
“Let’s start with a credit line of fifty million dollars at the Gemeinschaft Bank in Zurich, Switzerland.”
“That’s very convincing, but they’re only words. Who’s putting up the collateral?”
“The Gemeinschaft knows. You don’t have to.”
It was all Kendrick had to hear. The full weight of the United States government bearing down on a Zurich bank with known connections to men who dealt with terrorists from the Baaka Valley to Cyprus would be enough to break the Swiss codes of secrecy and silence. “I’ll confirm the line of credit in Zurich in thirty-six hours,” he said, getting up. “Will that give you sufficient time?”
“More than sufficient,” replied the small man in the large chair. “And when you have confirmation, you’ll do Vice President Bollinger the courtesy of sending him a copy of your telegram to Chicago irrevocably withdrawing your name for consideration on the national ticket.”
Kendrick nodded, glancing briefly at the three other contributors. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said quietly and then headed for the library door.
Out in the hallway a black-haired, muscular man with sharp, clean-cut features and the green dot of the Secret Service in his lapel rose from a chair beside a pair of thick double doors. “Good evening, Congressman,” he said pleasantly, taking a step forward. “It’d be an honor to shake your hand, sir.”
“My pleasure.”
“I know we’re not to say who comes and goes around here,” continued the member of the Treasury Department detail, gripping Evan’s hand, “but I may break that rule for my mother in New York. Perhaps it sounds crazy, but she thinks you should be Pope.”
“The Curia might find me lacking.… The Vice President asked me to see him before I left. He said he’d be in his office.”
“Certainly. It’s right here, and let me tell you he’d welcome the interruption. He’s got an irritated man in there with such a short fuse I didn’t trust the machines and nearly strip-searched him. I wouldn’t let him take his bag of paraphernalia inside.”
For the first time, Kendrick saw the garment carryon draped across the chair at the left of the double doors. Beneath it, on the floor, was a bulky black case commonly referred to as a medical bag. Evan stared at it; he had seen it before. The inner screen of his mind was jolted, fragments of images replacing one another like successive explosions! Stone walls in another hallway, another door; a tall, slender man with a ready smile—too ready, too ingratiating for a stranger in a strange house—a doctor casually, amusingly stating that he would merely thump a chest and take a sample of blood for analysis.
“If you don’t mind,” said Kendrick, somehow through the mists, realizing that he could barely be heard, “please open the door.”
“I’ve got to knock first, Congressman—”
“No, please!… Please do as I say.”
“The Vipe—the Vice President—won’t appreciate that, sir. We’re always to knock first.”
“Open that door,” ordered Evan, his rasping voice a whisper, his eyes wide, fixed briefly on the Secret Service man. “I’ll take full responsibility.”
“Sure, sure. If anyone’s entitled I guess you are.”
The heavy door on the right swung silently back, the words hissed by a tight-throated Bollinger clearly heard. “What you’re saying is preposterous, insane!… Yes, what is it?”
Kendrick walked through the terrible space and stared at the shocked, panic-stricken face of “Dr. Eugene Lyons.”
“You!” screamed Evan, the isolated world inside his head going mad as he lunged, racing across the room, his two hands the claws of a maniacal animal intent only on the kill—the kill! “He’s going to die because of you—because of all of you!”
In a blur of violence, arms gripped him; hands chopped into his head, and knees crashed up into his groin and his stomach, his eyes bruised by experienced fingers. Despite the agonizing pain, he heard the muted screams—one after another.
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“I’ve got him! He’s not going to move.”
“Close the door!”
“Get me my bag!”
“Keep everyone out!”
“Oh, Jesus, he knows everything!”
“What do we do?”
“… I know people who can handle this.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Someone who should introduce himself … Viper.”
“I’ve heard that name. It’s an insult! Who are you?”
“For the moment I’m in charge, that’s who I am.”
“Oh, Christ …!”
Darkness—the oblivion that comes with the deepest shock. All was black; nothing.
40
He felt the wind and the spray first, then the motion of the sea, and finally the wide cloth straps that constricted him, binding him to the metal chair bolted into the deck of the pitching boat. He opened his eyes in the moving darkness; he was in the stern, the foaming wake receding in front of him, and was suddenly aware of cabin lights behind him. He turned, craning his neck to see, to understand. Abruptly, he was face-to-face with the dark-haired, swarthy Secret Service guard whose mother in New York thought he should be Pope … and whose voice he had heard proclaiming himself to be in charge. The man sat in an adjacent deep-sea fighting chair, a single strap across his waist.
“Waking up, Congressman?” he asked politely.
“What the hell have you done?” roared Kendrick, struggling against the restricting straps.
“Sorry about those, but we didn’t want you falling over the side. The water’s a little rough; we were just protecting you while you got some air.”
“ ‘Protecting …?’ Goddamn you, you bastards drugged me and carried me out of there against my will! You’ve kidnapped me! My office knows where I went tonight … you’re going to draw twenty years for this, all of you! And that son of a bitch Bollinger will be impeached and spend—”
“Hold it, hold it,” broke in the man, raising his hands, calmly protesting. “You’ve got it all wrong, Congressman. Nobody drugged you, you were sedated. You went crazy back there. You attacked a guest of the Vice President; you might have killed him—”
“I would have, I will kill him! Where’s that doctor, where is he?”
“What doctor?”
“You lying shit!” yelled Kendrick into the wind, straining at the cloth straps. Then he was struck by a thought. “My limousine, the driver! He knows I didn’t leave.”
“But you did. You weren’t feeling too well, so you didn’t say much and you wore your tinted glasses, but you were very generous with your tip.”
As the boat lurked in the water, Evan suddenly looked down at the clothes he was wearing, squinting in the dim wash of light coming from the cabin behind him. The trousers were a thick corduroy and the shirt a coarse black denim … not his clothes. “Bastards!” he roared again, and again another thought. “Then they saw me get out at the hotel!”
“Sorry, but you didn’t go to the hotel. About the only thing you said to the driver was to drop you off at Balboa Park, that you had to meet someone and you’d take a cab home.”
“You covered yourselves right down to my clothes. You’re all garbage, you hired killers!”
“You keep getting it wrong, Congressman. We were covering for you, not anybody else. We didn’t know what you’d been snorting or shooting into your veins, but as my excitable grandfather would say, we saw you go pazzo, crazy, you know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“So naturally we couldn’t let you be seen in public, you can understand that, can’t you?”
“Va bene, you Mafia prick. I heard you—‘I’m in charge,’ you said. ‘I know people who can handle this,’ you said that, too.”
“You know, Congressman, although I admire you a great deal, I’m very offended by anti-Italian generalizations.”
“Tell that to the federal prosecutor in New York,” replied Kendrick as the boat dipped sharply, then rose with a heavy wave. “Giuliani’s been putting you away by the truckload.”
“Yes, well, talking about things that go bump in the night, which we weren’t but we could have been in this water, a number of people in Balboa Park saw a man who could easily fit your description—I mean dressed like you when you left the hotel and then in the limo—going into the Balthazar.”
“The what?”
“It’s a coffeehouse in Balboa. You know we’ve got a lot of students down here; they come from all over, and there’s a large contingent from the Mediterranean. You know, kids from families who lived in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Egypt … even what some still call Palestine, I guess. Sometimes the coffee gets out of hand—politically, that is—and the police have to quiet things and confiscate items like guns and knives. Those people are very emotional.”
“And I was seen going inside, and naturally there’ll be those inside who’ll confirm I was there.”
“Your bravery has never been questioned, Congressman. You go into the most dangerous places looking for solutions, don’t you? Oman, Bahrain … even the house of the Vice President of the United States.”
“Add bribery to your list, garbageman.”
“Now just a minute! I haven’t anything to do with whatever you came to see Viper about, get that straight. I’m just providing a service beyond my official duties, that’s all.”
“Because you ‘know people who can handle this,’ like someone wearing my clothes and using my car and walking in Balboa Park. And maybe a couple of others who were able to get me out of Bollinger’s place with no one recognizing me.”
“A private ambulance service is very convenient and discreet when guests become ill or overindulge.”
“And, no doubt, one or two others to divert whatever press or maintenance people might be around.”
“My nongovernment associates are on call for emergencies, sir. We’re happy to provide assistance wherever we can.”
“For a price, of course.”
“Definitely.… They pay, Congressman. They pay in lots of ways, now more than ever.”
“For also including a fast boat and an experienced captain?”
“Oh, we can’t take credit where it isn’t due,” protested the man from the Mafia, enjoying himself. “This is their equipment, their skipper. There are just some things people do better for themselves, especially if one of them is going into the heavily patrolled waters between the U.S. and Mexico. There’s clout and then again there’s different clout, if you know what I’m saying.”
Kendrick felt a third presence but, turning in the chair, saw no one else on the deck of the pleasure yacht. Then he raised his eyes to the aft railing of the fly bridge. A figure stepped back into the shadows but not quickly enough. It was the excessively tall, deeply tanned contributor from Bollinger’s library, and from what could be seen of his face, it was contorted in hatred. “Are all of the Vice President’s guests on board?” he asked, seeing that the mafioso had followed his gaze.
“What guests?”
“You’re cute, Luigi.”
“There’s a captain and one crew. I’ve never seen either of them before.”
“Where are we going?”
“On a cruise.”
The boat slowed down as the beam of a powerful searchlight shot out from the bridge. The Mafia soldier unstrapped himself and got up; he walked across the deck and down into the lower cabin. Evan could hear him on an intercom, but with the wind and the slapping waves was unable to make out the words. Moments later the man returned; in his hand was a gun, a standard issue, Colt .45 automatic. Suppressing the panic he felt, Kendrick thought of the sharks of Qatar and wondered if another Mahdi across the world was about to carry out the sentence of death pronounced in Bahrain. If it was to be, Evan made the same decision he had made in Bahrain: he would fight. Better a quick, expeditious bullet in the head than the prospect of drowning or being torn apart by man-eaters of the Pacific.
“We’
re here, Congressman,” said the mafioso courteously.
“Where is here?”
“Damned if I know. It’s some kind of island.”
Kendrick closed his eyes, giving thanks to whoever cared to accept them, and began to breathe without trembling again. The hero of Oman was a fraud, he reflected. He simply did not care to die and, fear aside, there was Khalehla. The love that had eluded him all his life was his, and every additional minute he was permitted to live was a minute of hope. “From the looks of you I don’t think you really need that,” he said, nodding his head at the weapon.
“Not from your press,” replied the Secret Service guard positioned by the upper ranks of the underworld. “I’m going to unbuckle you, but if you make any sudden moves you won’t step foot on land, capisce?”
“Molto bene.”
“Don’t blame me, I’ve been given my instructions. When you provide a service, you accept reasonable orders.”
Evan heard the snaps and felt the wide cloth straps loosening around his arms and legs. “Has it occurred to you that if you carried out those orders, you might never get back to San Diego?” he asked.
“Certainly,” answered the mafioso casually. “That’s why we’ve got the Viper in a vise. ‘Viper in a vise.’ Acceptable alliteration, wouldn’t you say?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m a construction engineer, not a poet.”
“And I’ve got a gun in my hand, which means I’m not a poet either. So behave, Congressman.”
“I assume ‘Viper’ is the Vice President.”
“Yes, and he said he’d heard the name and it was an insult. Can you imagine? Those fuckers had the moral turpitude to bug our unit?”
“I’m appalled,” replied Kendrick, rising awkwardly from the metal chair and shaking his arms and legs, restoring circulation.
“Easy!” cried the Secret Service man, leaping back, his .45 leveled at Evan’s head.
“You try sitting in that damned thing for as long as I did the way I did and think you’re going to walk a straight line!”
“Okay, okay. Then walk a crooked line over there to the side of this fancy tug, to the steps. That’s where you’re getting off.”