Dragonfly

ONE

When he woke shortly after three o'clock Wednesday morning, Roger Berlinson thought he heard strange voices in the house. A quick word or two. Then silence. An unnatural silence? He was clutching the sweat-dampened sheets so tightly that his arms ached all the way to his shoulders. He let go of the sodden linens and worked the cramps out of his fingers. Trembling, he reached out with his right hand, pulled open the top drawer of the nightstand, and picked up the loaded pistol that was lying there. In the moon-dappled darkness he performed a blind man's exploration of the gun until he was certain that both of the safeties were switched off. Then he lay perfectly still, listening.

The house was on a low bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In the empty early-morning hours the only sounds at the windows were the voices of nature: the soughing of a southwesterly wind, distant thunder, and the steady rush of the tide. Inside the house there were no voices, no squeaking floorboards, nothing but Berlinson's own heavy breathing.

It's just your imagination, he told himself. Putney is on the midnight-to-eight duty. He's downstairs in the kitchen right now, monitoring the alarm systems. If there was any trouble, he'd take care of it before it got serious. Putney's a damned good man; he doesn't make mistakes. So we're safe. There's absolutely no danger. You've had another nightmare, that's all.

Nevertheless, Berlinson threw back the covers and got out of bed and stepped into his felt-lined slippers. His moist pajamas clung to his back and thighs; chills swept down his spine.

He held the gun at his side. In an instant he could bring it up, swivel, and fire in any direction. He was well trained.

His wife, Anna, stirred in her sleep, but thanks to her nightly sedative, did not wake up. She turned over on her stomach and mumbled into the pillow and sighed.

Quietly, cautiously, Berlinson crossed the room to the open door and eased into the second-floor hall. The corridor was much darker than the bedroom, for it had only one window at the far end. Berlinson had just enough light to see that everything was as it should be: the telephone table was at the head of the stairs; a large vase full of straw flowers stood on the window bench at the end of the hall; and the flimsy curtains billowed in the draft from the air-conditioning vent high on the right-hand wall.

Berlinson walked past the staircase and on down the hall to his son's room. Peter was in bed, lying on his side, facing the door, snoring softly. Under the circumstances, no one but a teenager, with an appetite for sleep as great as his appetite for food and activity, could possibly have slept so soundly, so serenely, without the aid of a drug.

There you are, Berlinson told himself. Everyone's safe. There's no danger here. No one from the agency can possibly know where you are. No one. Except McAlister. Well, what about McAlister? Hell, he's on your side. You can trust him. Can't you? Yes. Implicitly. So there you are.

However, instead of returning straight to bed, he went to the stairs and down to the first floor. The living room was full of dark, lumpish furniture. A grandfather clock ticked in a far corner; its pendulum provided the only movement, the only noise, the only sign of life, either animal or mechanical, in the room. The dining room was also deserted. The many-paned glass doors of the china hutch — and the dishes shelved beyond the glass — gleamed in the eerie orange light. Berlinson went into the kitchen, where the Halloweenish glow, the only light in the house, emanated from several expensive, complicated machines that stood on the Formica-topped breakfast table.

Putney was gone.

“Joe?”

There was no reply.

Berlinson went to look at the monitors — and he found Joseph Putney on the other side of the table. The night guard was sprawled on the floor, on his back, his arms out to his sides as if he were trying to fly, a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. His eyes glittered demonically in the orange light from the screens.

Now hold on, keep control, keep cool, Berlinson thought as he automatically crouched and turned to see if anyone had moved in behind him.

He was still alone.

Glancing at the four repeater screens of the infrared alarm system which protected the house, Berlinson saw that the machines were functioning and had detected no enemies. All approaches to the house — north, east, south, and west from the beach — were drawn in thermal silhouette on these monitors. No heat-producing source, neither man nor animal nor machine, could move onto the property without immediately registering on the system, setting off a loud alarm, and thereby alerting the entire household.

Yet Putney was dead.

The alarm system had been circumvented. Someone was in the house. His cover was blown; the agency had come after him. In the morning Anna would find him just as he had found Putney…

No, dammit! You're a match for them. You're as good and as fast as they are: you're one of them, for Christ's sake, a snake from the same nest. You'll get Anna and Petey out of here, and you'll go with them.

He moved along the wall, back toward the dining room, through the archway, past the hutch, into the living room, to the main stairs. He studied the darkness at the top of the staircase. The man — or men— who had killed Putney might be up there now. Probably was. But there was no other way Berlinson could reach his family. He had to risk it. Keeping his back to the wall, alternately glancing at the landing above and at the living room below, expecting to be caught in a crossfire at any moment, he went up step by step, slowly, silently.

Unmolested, he covered sixteen of the twenty risers, then stopped when he saw that there was someone sitting on the top step and leaning against the banister. He almost opened fire, but even in these deep shadows, the other man was somehow familiar. When there was no challenge made, no threat, no movement at all, Berlinson inched forward — and discovered that the man on the steps was Peter, his son. The front of Petey's pajama shirt was soaked with blood; he had been shot in the throat.

No! Dammit, no! Berlinson thought, weeping, shuddering, cursing, sick to his stomach. Not my family, damn you. Me, but not my family. That's the rule. That's the way the game's played. Never the family. You crazy sonsofbitches! No, no, no!

He stumbled off the steps and ran across the hall, crouching low, the pistol held out in front of him. He fell and rolled through the open bedroom door, came up onto his knees fast, and fired twice into the wall beside the door.

No one was there.

Should have been, dammit. Should have been someone there.

He crawled around behind the bed, using it as a shield. Cautiously, he rose up to see if Anna was all right. In the moonlight the blood on the sheets looked as viscous and black as sludge oil.

At the sight of her, Berlinson lost control of himself. “Come out!” he shouted to the men who must now be in the corridor, listening, waiting to burst in on him. “Show yourselves, you bastards!”

On his right the closet door was flung open.

Berlinson fired at it.

A man cried out and fell full length into the room. His gun clattered against the legs of a chair.

“Roger!”

Berlinson whirled toward the voice which came from the hall door. A silenced pistol hissed three times. Berlinson collapsed onto the bed, clutching at the covers and at Anna. Absurdly, he thought: I can't be dying. My life hasn't flashed before my eyes. I can't be dying if my life hasn't

TWO

When the doorbell rang at eleven o'clock that morning, David Canning was studying the leaves of his schefflera plant for signs of the mealybugs he had routed with insecticide a week ago. Seven feet tall and with two hundred leaves, the schefflera was more accurately a tree than a house plant. He had purchased it last month and was already as attached to it as he had once been, as a boy, to a beagle puppy. The tree offered none of the lively companionship that came with owning a pet; however, Canning found great satisfaction in caring for it — watering, misting, sponging, spraying with Malathion — and in watching it respond with continued good health and delicate new shoots.

Satisfied that the mealybugs had not regenerated, he went to the door, expecting to find a salesman on the other side.

Instead, McAlister was standing in the hall. He was wearing a five-hundred-dollar raincoat and was just pulling the hood back from his head. He was alone, and that was unusual; he always traveled with one or two aides and a bodyguard. McAlister glanced at the round magnifying glass in Canning's hand, then up at his face. He smiled. “Sherlock Holmes, I presume.”

“I was just examining my tree,” Canning said.

“You're a wonderful straight man. Examining your tree?”

“Come in and have a look.”

McAlister crossed the living room to the schefflera. He moved with grace and consummate self-assurance. He was slender: five ten, a hundred forty pounds. But he was in no way a small man, Canning thought. His intelligence, cunning, and self-possession were more impressive than size and muscle. His oblong face was square-jawed and deeply tanned. Inhumanly blue eyes, an electrifying shade that existed nowhere else beyond the technicolor fantasies on a Cinema-Scope screen, were accentuated by old-fashioned hornrimmed glasses. His lips were full but bloodless. He looked like a Boston Brahmin, which he was: at twenty-one he had come into control of a two-million-dollar trust fund. His dark hair was gray at the temples, an attribute he used, as did bankers and politicians, to make himself seem fatherly, experienced, and trustworthy. He was experienced and trustworthy; but he was too shrewd and calculating ever to seem fatherly. In spite of his gray hair he appeared ten years younger than his fifty-one. Standing now with his fists balled on his hips, he had the aura of a cocky young man.

“By God, it is a tree!”

“I told you,” Canning said, joining him in front of the schefflera. He was taller and heavier than McAlister: six one, a hundred seventy pounds. In college he had been on the basketball team. He was lean, almost lanky, with long arms and large hands. He was wearing only jeans and a blue T-shirt, but his clothes were as neat, clean, and well pressed as were McAlister's expensive suit and coat. Everything about Canning was neat, from his full-but-not-long razor-cut hair to his brightly polished loafers.

“What's it doing here?” McAlister asked.

“Growing.”

“That's all?”

“That's all I ask of it.”

“What were you doing with the magnifying glass?”

“The tree had mealybugs. I took care of them, but they can come back. You have to check every few days for signs of them.”

“What are mealybugs?”

Canning knew McAlister wasn't just making small talk. He had a bottomless curiosity, a need to know something about everything; yet his knowledge was not merely anecdotal, for he knew many things well. A lunchtime conversation with him could be fascinating. The talk might range from primitive art to current developments in the biological sciences, and from there, to pop music to Beethoven to Chinese cooking to automobile comparisons to American history. He was a Renaissance man — and he was more than that.

“Mealybugs are tiny,” Canning said. “You need a magnifying glass to see them. They're covered with white fuzz that makes them look like cotton fluff. They attach themselves to the undersides of the leaves, along the leaf veins, and especially in the green sheaths that protect new shoots. They suck the plant's juices, destroy it.”

“Vampires.”

“In a way.”

“I meet them daily. In fact, I want to talk to you about mealybugs.”

“The human kind.”

“That's right.” He stripped off his coat and almost dropped it on a nearby chair. Then he caught himself and handed it to Canning, who had a neatness fetish well known to anyone who had ever worked with him. As Canning hung the coat in the carefully ordered foyer closet, McAlister said, “Would it be possible to fix some coffee, David?”

“Already done,” he said, leading McAlister into the kitchen. “I made a fresh pot this morning. Cream? Sugar?”

“Cream,” McAlister said. “No sugar.”

“A breakfast roll?”

“Yes, that would be nice. I didn't have time to eat this morning.”

Motioning to the table that stood by the large mullioned window, Canning said, “Sit down. Everything'll be ready in a few minutes.”

Of the four available chairs McAlister took that one which faced the living-room archway and which put him in a defensible corner. He chose not to sit with his back to the window. Instead, the glass was on his right side, so that he could look through it but probably could not be seen by anyone in the gardened courtyard outside.

He's a natural-born agent, Canning thought.

But McAlister would never spend a day in the field. He always started at the top — and did his job as well as he could have done had he started at the bottom. He had served as Secretary of State during the previous administration's first term, then moved over to the White House, where he occupied the chief advisory post during half of the second term. He had quit that position when, in the midst of a White House scandal, the President had asked him to lie to a grand jury. Now, with the opposition party in power, McAlister had another important job, for he was a man whose widely recognized integrity made it possible for him to function under Republicans or Democrats. In February he had been appointed to the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency, armed with a Presidential mandate to clean up that dangerously autonomous, corrupt organization. The McAlister nomination was approved swiftly by the Senate, one month to the day after the new President was inaugurated. McAlister had been at the agency — cooperating with the Justice Department in exposing crimes that had been committed by agency men — ever since the end of February, seven headline-filled months ago.

Canning had been in this business more than six months. He'd been a CIA operative for twenty years, ever since he was twenty-five. During the cold war he carried out dozens of missions in the Netherlands, West Germany, East Germany, and France. He had gone secretly behind the Iron Curtain on seven separate occasions, usually to bring out an important defector. Then he was transferred Stateside and put in charge of the agency's Asian desk, where the Vietnam mess required the attendance of a man who had gone through years of combat, both hot and cold. After fourteen months in the office, Canning returned to field work and established new CIA primary networks in Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. He operated easily and well in Asia. His fastidious personal habits, his compulsive neatness, appealed to the middle-and upper-class Asians who were his contacts, for many of them still thought of Westerners as quasi-barbarians who bathed too seldom and carried their linen-wrapped snot in their hip pockets. Likewise, they appreciated Canning's Byzantine mind, which, while it was complex and rich and full of classic oriental cunning, was ordered like a vast file cabinet. Asia was, he felt, the perfect place for him to spend the next decade and a half in the completion of a solid, even admirable career.

However, in spite of his success, the agency took him off his Asian assignment when he was beginning his fifth year there. Back home he was attached to the Secret Service at the White House, where he acted as a special consultant for Presidential trips overseas. He helped to define the necessary security precautions in those countries that he knew all too well.

McAlister chaired these Secret Service strategy conferences, and it was here that Canning and he had met and become friends of a sort. They had kept in touch even after McAlister resigned from the White House staff — and now they were working together again. And again McAlister was the boss, even though his own experience in the espionage circus was far less impressive than Canning's background there. But then, McAlister would be boss wherever he worked; he was born to it. Canning could no more resent that than he could resent the fact that grass was green instead of purple. Besides, the director of the agency had to deal daily with politicians, a chore of which Canning wanted no part.

“Smells good,” McAlister said, stirring cream into his steaming coffee.

Canning had set the table as if he were serving a full meal, everything properly arranged, every item squared off from the nearest other item: placemats, paper napkins, silverware, cups and saucers, a platter of rolls, a butter dish, butter knives, a cream pitcher, sugar bowl, and sugar spoon. He poured his own coffee and set the percolator on a wrought-iron coaster. “The raisin-filled buns are pretty good.” He buttered a roll, took a few bites, washed it down with coffee, and waited to hear why McAlister had come to see him.

“I was afraid you might have gone away for your vacation and I'd have trouble locating you,” McAlister said.

“I've traveled enough over the last twenty-five years.”

McAlister buttered another piece of roll and said, “I was sorry to hear about you and Irene.”

Canning nodded.

“Divorce or separation?”

“Separation. For now. Later on — probably a divorce.”

“I'm sorry.”

Canning said nothing.

“I hope it was amicable.”

“It was.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Twenty-seven years.”

“Traumatic after all that time.”

“Not if there's no love involved on either side.”

McAlister's blue eyes looked through him as if they were X-ray devices. “I tried to reach you at your house in Falls Church, but Irene sent me here. How long has it been?”

“We split eight weeks ago. I've been renting this apartment since the middle of August.”

“The children?”

“Mike's twenty-six. Terri's twenty. So, no custody fight.”

“And there's no animosity between you and them?”

“They aren't taking sides.” Canning put down his half-eaten roll and wiped his fingers on his napkin. “Let's stop the psychoanalysis. You need me. You want to know if I'm emotionally stable enough to handle a new job. I am. The separation's for the best. And a new assignment, something more interesting than this White House post, would be a tonic.”

McAlister studied him for a moment. “All right.” He leaned forward, his arms on the table, and folded his hands around his coffee cup as if to warm his fingers. “You must know some of the things that I've uncovered since I came to the agency.”

“I read the papers.”

“Has any of it shocked you?”

“No. Anyone with a trace of common sense has known for years that the agency's a haven for crackpots. There's a lot of work the agency has to do. Most of it's dirty, ugly, and dangerous. But necessary. It isn't easy to find normal, sensible, decent men to do it.”

“But you're normal, sensible, and decent.”

“I like to think so. I wouldn't get involved in some of these crazy schemes you've unearthed lately. But there are agents who want to get involved, adolescents playing out the cheapest masturbatory fantasies. But they aren't just on the agency. They're everywhere these days.” A fierce, prolonged gust of wind drove rain against the window. The droplets burst and streamed like tears. Or like colorless blood, a psychic intimation of blood to come, Canning thought. “These lunatics got into the agency because they had the proper politics. Back when I joined up, loyalty mattered more than philosophy. But for the last fifteen years, until you came along, applicants who were solid middle-of-the-road independents, like me, were rejected out of hand. A moderate is the same as a leftist to these nuts. Hell, I know men who think Nixon was a Communist dupe. We've been employing neo-Nazis for years. So the newspaper stories don't shock or even surprise me. I just hope the agency can survive the housecleaning.”

“It will. Because, as you said, we need it.”

“I suppose,” Canning said.

“Did you know any of the agents who have been indicted?”

“I've heard some of the names. I never worked with them.”

“Well,” McAlister said, “what you've read in the newspapers isn't half as shocking as what you'll never read there.” He drank the last of his coffee. “I've always believed in the public's right to know…”

“But?”

Smiling ruefully, McAlister said, “But since I've learned what the agency's been doing, I've tempered that opinion somewhat. If the worst were made public during our lifetime, the country would be shaken to its roots, blasted apart. The Kennedy assassinations… The most hideous crimes… They'd riot in the streets.” He wasn't smiling any longer. “It wasn't the agency alone. There are other threads. Powerful politicians. Mafiosi. Some of the richest, most socially prominent men in the country. If the people knew how far off the rails this nation went for more than a decade, we'd be ripe for a demagogue of the worst kind.”

For the first time since he'd opened the front door and seen McAlister in the hall, Canning realized that the man had changed. At a glance he looked healthy, even robust. But he'd lost ten pounds. His face was more deeply lined than when he'd first assumed the directorship. Behind the aura of youthful energy, he was weary and drawn. His eyes, as blue and clear as they'd ever been, were filled with the sorrow of a man who has come home to find his wife happily gang-banging a group of strange men. In McAlister's case the wife was not a woman but a country.

“It's one of these other horrors, something besides the assassinations, that's brought you here.” Canning poured more coffee.

“You don't seem surprised by what I've told you.”

“Of course I'm not surprised. Anyone who reads the Warren Report has to be a fool to believe it.”

“I guess I was a fool for years,” McAlister said. “But now I need a first-rate agent I can trust. A dozen good men are available. But you're the only one I'm even half sure isn't a Committeeman.”

Frowning, Canning said, “A what?”

“We've discovered that within the CIA there's another organization, illegal and illicit, a tightly knit cell of men who call themselves The Committee. True Believers, fanatical anti-Communists.”

“Masturbating adolescents.”

“Yes, but they're dangerous. They have connections with extreme right-wing, paramilitary groups like the Minutemen. They're friendly with certain Mafiosi, and they're not short of patrons among men in New York banking and Texas oil. The Committee had a part in assassinations, other things… They answer to no one in government.”

“Then why haven't you broken them?”

“We don't know who they are,” McAlister said. “We have two names. Two of the men already under indictment. But there are at least twenty or twenty-five others. Hard-core operatives. They'll serve their time rather than do any plea bargaining. They'll never testify against the others. So we're still working on it. I'm setting up a staff of investigators — men who've had no contact whatsoever with the agency, men I know I can trust.”

Canning understood that when McAlister spoke of investigators, he meant lawyers, men who approached this kind of problem in terms of subpoenas, grand juries, indictments, prosecutions, and eventual convictions. But for the most part Canning was a field op, a man who liked to take direct action the instant he saw what the trouble was; he was not a paper shuffler. Although he respected the mass of laws upon which civilization was built, he was trained to solve problems quickly by circumventing all authorities and legal channels. He knew McAlister was fully aware of this. Nevertheless, he said, “And you want me on this staff?”

“Perhaps later.” Which meant never. “Right now I need you for something more urgent.” He sipped his coffee: a dramatic pause. “This is so important and secret that no one must know you've been brought into it. That's why I came to see you instead of sending for you. And that's why I came alone. I was especially careful not to be followed.”

That was Canning's cue to ask what this was all about. Instead of that, he said, “What makes you think I'm trustworthy?”

“You're too much of a realist to be a brown shirt. I know you.”

“And you are too much of a realist to choose a man for an important assignment because you happen to like him. So what's the rest of the story?”

Leaning back in his chair, McAlister said, “Did you ever wonder why you were taken off the top job in the Asian bureau?”

“I shouldn't have been.”

“Agreed.”

“You know why I was?”

McAlister nodded. “I've read the entire agency file on you. It contains a number of unsigned memos from field ops stationed in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand during your tenure there. They complain that you put them under too much restraint.”

Canning said, “Too damned many of them were ready to settle any problem with a gun or a knife.” He sighed softly. “They didn't even like to stop and think if there might be a better, easier way.” He ran one hand over his face. “You mean that's all it took for the director to pull me out of Asia? Unsigned memos?” “Well, there was also Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby.”

They were three men who had served under Canning. Karl Duncan and Mason Tyler, who had once operated in Thailand, had tortured to death an American expatriate whom they “suspected” of being involved in illegal arms sales to guerilla leaders. Derek Bixby did his dirty work in Cambodia. He tortured the wife and eleven-year-old daughter of a Cambodian merchant, in front of the merchant's eyes, until he had obtained a hidden set of papers that were en route from Hanoi to a guerilla general who was a close friend of the merchant. Once the documents were in his hands, Bixby murdered the man, wife, and child. In both cases neither torture nor murder was warranted. Infuriated, Canning had seen to it that Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby were not only taken out of Asia but were also dismissed from the agency when they returned Stateside.

“They were animals,” Canning said.

“You did the right thing. But Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby had friends in high places. Those friends engineered your withdrawal from Asia and saw you were given a harmless domestic assignment at the White House.”

Sharp lines of anger webbed Canning's skin at eyes and mouth.

“Furthermore,” McAlister said, “Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby are all quite close to the two men we know are Committeemen. We've reason to believe that Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby are working in a civilian capacity with The Committee and are being paid with misappropriated agency funds. No proof — yet. Anyway, it seems unlikely that you have ever been one of them. Otherwise, why would you have fired those three?” He leaned forward again. “As I said, I'm half sure of you. There's a chance I'll be stabbed in the back. But the odds of that happening are lower with you than with anyone else I know.”

Canning rose, took his cup and saucer to the sink and rinsed them thoroughly. He came back and stood at the window, watching the rain that slanted icily across the courtyard and pooled on the bricks. “What is this urgent assignment you have for me?”

Taking a pipe from one jacket pocket and a pouch of tobacco from another, McAlister said, “During the last six months we've been building a new file from dribs and drabs of information — a name here, a rendezvous point there, a dozen rumors; you know how it works in this business — concerning a very special project the Committeemen have going for them.”

Canning got a ten-inch circular white-glass ashtray from a cupboard and put it in front of McAlister.

“Five days ago an agent named Berlinson came to me and said he was a Committeeman. He was about to be indicted for his role in several domestic operations that were aimed at destroying the political careers of three potential liberal Presidential candidates. He didn't want to stand trial because he knew he would end up in jail. So he and I reached an agreement. He was quite willing to talk. But as it happens, lower-echelon agents of The Committee know only one or two others in the organization. Berlinson couldn't give me a complete roster. He couldn't tell me who stands at the head of the group. That was quite a disappointment.”

“I can imagine.”

“But it wasn't a total loss,” McAlister said as he tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. “Berlinson was able to give me a general outline of this special project I'd been hearing about. It centers on an as yet unknown Chinese citizen who has been made, quite literally, into a walking bomb casing for a chemical-biological weapon that could kill tens of thousands of his people. The Committeemen have a code name for him — Dragonfly.”

Canning sat down at the table again. “These reactionaries — these idiots intend to wage their own private war against China?”

“Something like that.” McAlister struck a match, held the flame to the tobacco, and got his pipe fired up. He carefully put the burnt match in the center of the ashtray.

“Berlinson has no idea who the carrier is?”

“All he knew was that Dragonfly is a Chinese citizen who was in the United States or Canada sometime between New Year's Day and February fifteenth of this year. That doesn't really narrow it down much. Canada has had friendly relations with China considerably longer than we have; she does a great deal of business with them. At any given moment there are at least two hundred Chinese citizens in Canada: government representatives, officials of various Chinese industries, and artists who are involved in cultural exchange programs. In the United Stares, of course, there's the Chinese delegation to the United Nations. And at one time or another during the forty-six days in question, we also played host to a contingent of trade negotiators, a touring group of forty officials from the Central Office of Publications who were here to study American publishing processes and printing methods, and finally, a symphony orchestra from Peking.”

“How many suspects are there in both the U.S. and Canada?” Canning asked.

“Five hundred and nine.”

“And I take it that Dragonfly, whoever he is, doesn't know anything about what's been done to him.”

“That's right. He's an innocent.”

“But how could he be? How was it done?”

“It's a long story.”

“I'll listen.”

McAlister poured himself another cup of coffee.

While he picked up crumbs from his placemat and put them, one at a time, in the center of his paper napkin, Canning listened to McAlister's story and took the facts from it and placed them, one at a time, in the neatly ordered file drawers of his mind. No matter with whom he was talking, no matter where or when, Canning was a good listener. He interrupted only to ask essential questions and to keep the conversation from digressing.

With McAlister, of course, there were no digressions. He recited the facts with so few hesitations and with such economy of words that he might have been retelling a short story that he had committed to memory.

It began with Dr. Olin Eugene Wilson — product of a strict and extremely religious family, witness at the McCarthy Hearings, where he testified against alleged Communists in the Pentagon, John Bircher, and self-styled fascist — who believed implicitly in Shockley's theories of Negro inferiority and the supremacy of the White Race.

Although he had not conceived the specific operation that was now known as the Dragonfly project, Dr. Wilson was the one man without whom the scheme could never have been realized. For thirty years Wilson had worked for the Department of Defense. He was a research biochemist, one of the most brilliant men in his field. The greater part of his important work had been done at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, where he supervised the development of half a dozen chemical and/or biological weapons that could topple an enemy government within seventy-two hours of the declaration of war. In 1969, when President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer engage in research for offensive biological warfare, Wilson was so infuriated that he presented his resignation to the chief of staff at Detrick. Certain highly placed civilian and military officials quickly assured Wilson that the President's speech had been more of a public-relations gimmick than a genuine commitment. Yes, Detrick's labs would be converted into facilities for cancer research. Yes, only weapons projects labeled “defensive” would be developed from this day forward. However…

Fort Detrick had already become too much of a target for crusading journalists and peace demonstrators; therefore, it was time to move the CBW program into more modern and less well publicized quarters. As to whether or not the doctor would now be limited to defensive-weapons research… Well, they had a qualification of the President's statement which satisfied Wilson. They explained that once the United States was attacked with a chemical and/or biological weapon, it would have to strike back immediately; and then those weapons which might have been labeled offensive when used for a first strike became defensive the moment they were used for retaliatory purposes. Thus educated in semantics, Wilson returned to work, happy and relatively secure. Within days of the President's speech, Olin Wilson launched a program to study the feasibility of encapsulating anthrax, plague virus, and other disease strains and implanting them within the human body to create a walking biological time bomb that could be triggered either ten minutes from now, ten years from now, or at any moment in between.

“Naturally,” Canning said, “Wilson was successful. The agency heard about it. And the Committeemen made Wilson an offer to come over to them.”

“Which he did.”

Canning frowned. “And Army security, Pentagon security, the security forces at the lab — none of them tumbled to the fact that he was farming out his data?”

“None of them.”

In late 1972, loudly professing his disenchantment with the current U.S.-Soviet detente, Olin Wilson resigned from his position with the Department of Defense. By that time his absolute disgust with Nixonian foreign policy was widely known. He was one of a group of five hundred prominent scientists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other professionals who sponsored a series of anti-Communist advertisements in The New York Times. For the Sons of Truth, an up-and-coming right-wing organization similar to the John Birch Society, Wilson wrote a pamphlet entitled Communism, Richard Nixon, and the End of the American Dream. When he quit his job he said he was leaving because of his disillusionment with government policies and because of his despair over new national defense guidelines. He retired on a comfortable pension and on the income he received for speaking before any organization that would have him. For six months he jetted all over the country, addressing as many as five and six groups a week at a fee of seven hundred dollars plus expenses. Gradually, he was called to fewer and fewer podiums, until he began to spend most of his time at home in Alexandria, where he puttered in his garden and wrote angry letters to newspapers and magazines that supported or even gave voice to a liberal cause. A year after he resigned from government service, Wilson was leading such an uneventful life that any government security force that might have been watching him certainly must have decided to pack up and go away and leave him to his retirement. That was when Dr. Wilson went to work for The Committee.

“You mean they have a laboratory all their own?” Canning asked incredulously.

“That's correct.”

“But the sophisticated machinery, the maintenance… It would cost millions!”

After he had taken time to relight his pipe, McAlister said, “Nearly all its life the agency has not been held accountable to anyone for how it spends its funds. Not to the Congress. Not to the President. No one. Furthermore, it receives considerably more money from the federal budget than is readily apparent. Attached to the largest appropriations bills like Defense and Government Operations, there are dozens of smaller appropriations — five million here, two million there — for programs which are seldom if ever scrutinized. Some of these programs don't even exist. Their appropriations are tunneled directly to the agency. Once the agency has the money, it disburses it to a couple of hundred companies all over the world, firms that are nothing more than CIA fronts. No one man within the agency ever knows where all the money goes. So… It would be quite simple for these Committeemen to siphon off a couple of million a year for their own, private purposes. I'm sure that's what they've done — and are still doing.”

“But a laboratory devoted to chemical-biological warfare research is going to employ hundreds of people.”

“As recently as a week ago,” McAlister told him, “I'd have said the same thing. But since I learned about Dragonfly, I've been doing my homework. For Olin Wilson's purposes, a laboratory can be rather small. It can be staffed by as few as twelve specialists who are willing to be their own assistants. This kind of work is nowhere near as complicated as, say, searching for a cure for cancer. Any virus or bacterium can be cultured for pennies. For a few dollars you can grow enough plague virus to kill nine-tenths of the Russian population. Then you hit the remaining tenth with anthrax. Or worse. It's the delivery systems that pose the real problems, but even that kind of experimentation isn't prohibitively expensive. Biological warfare is cheap, David. That's why most all of the major world powers deal in it. It costs substantially less than the money needed to build more and more and more nuclear missiles.”

In the courtyard below, a young couple, sheltering under a newspaper, ran for an apartment door. Their laughter drifted up through the rain.

Cherry-scented tobacco smoke hung in the humid air in Canning's kitchen.

“If the lab employs only a dozen men,” Canning said, “there'd be no trouble keeping it a secret.”

“And if one of the wealthy businessmen who sympathize with the Committeemen happens to be the owner, director, or president of a chemical company, he could help create a plausible front for Wilson's work.”

“There ought to be records of some sort at this lab, something that would identify Dragonfly,” Canning said. “They'll be in code, but codes are made to be broken.”

“But we don't know where the lab is.”

“Berlinson couldn't tell you?”

“He'd heard of it. He'd been associated with Wilson. But he had never been to the lab.”

“And you haven't put a tail on Wilson?”

McAlister laid his pipe in the ashtray and smiled grimly. “Can't do that, I'm afraid. He's dead.”

“I see.”

“He was electrocuted while making his breakfast toast.”

“Quaint.”

“Seems there was a nasty short in the toaster's wiring. Brand-new toaster, too.”

“The Underwriters' Laboratories would be surprised to hear about that,” Canning said.

“I daresay.”

“When did this happen?”

“The day after Roger Berlinson came to my home and offered to tell me what he knew about The Committee, exactly sixteen hours after I first heard Olin Wilson's name.”

“How coincidental.”

“It's for Ripley.”

“And convenient.”

“Of course, Berlinson couldn't give me the names of any of the other scientists who are working at this lab. But from that moment on, I never talked with him in my own home or in my car or anywhere else that might be electronically monitored.”

“What more did Berlinson tell you?”

Early in 1971, while he was still employed by the Department of Defense, Dr. Wilson, with the aid of a hundred researchers, made several important breakthroughs in his work. He really did not strike out into any new territory, but he refined substances, pro-esses, and techniques that were already in use, refined them in the sense that an electric light bulb is merely a refinement of a wax candle, which, of course, it is, although it is much more than that. First of all he developed a petro-plastic spansule that was airtight, one hundred percent resistant to osmosis, neutral to body tissues, free of surface condensation, not even fractionally biodegradable — yet which was quite rubbery, unbreakable, and resilient. Second, he discovered a way to store deadly microorganisms within this spansule — a way to store them without the organisms losing more than five percent of their fertility, virility, and toxicity, no matter how long they were sealed up. Next, he worked out a procedure for implanting one of these spansules inside a human body in such a way that the carrier could not sense it, X-rays could not expose it, and only the most unlikely of accidents could open it before it was meant to be opened. Finally, he went outside of his specialty and applied other disciplines — surgery, psychology, pharmacology, espionage — to the problem until he perfected a way of turning any man into an unwitting, undetectable biological time bomb.

“Which is Dragonfly,” McAlister said.

“And now you're going to tell me how it actually works.”

“It's achingly simple.”

“I believe it,” Canning said. “Just from what you've told me so far, I think I can figure it out myself.”

“So you tell me.”

“First there's one thing I need to get straight.”

McAlister waited.

“The Dragonfly project was never meant to decimate the Chinese population, was it?”

“No.” McAlister picked up his pipe. “According to Berlinson, Dragonfly is carrying a severely mutated virus, something manufactured in the laboratory and essentially artificial in nature. It won't respond to any known drug; however, it was designed to have a poor rate of reproduction and a short life span. Seventy-two hours after the spansule is broken, the microorganisms in it and ninety percent of their progeny will be dead. In ninety-six hours, none of the microbes will exist. The threat is limited to four days. There isn't time for it to spread throughout China.”

“Wilson never intended to kill tens of millions.”

“Just tens of thousands. The stuffs apparently so toxic that a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand people will die in four days. But that will be the extent of it. Although I must say that this apparent concern for human life is not the product of any moral sensibility. It's a matter of logistics. If you kill millions of your enemy in a few days, you have an impossible logistics problem when you take over their country: how to get rid of the corpses.”

McAlister's eyes suddenly seemed to have become a bit more gray than blue.

Shaking his head in disgust, Canning said, “If the kill target is so low, then the intent is to destroy the political and military elite — all of the highest officers of the Party, their possible successors, and their families. In the turmoil and confusion, a relative handful of men could take control of Peking, the strategic ports, and all of China's nuclear weapons.”

“And it looks as if the Committeemen have more than a handful of men at their disposal,” McAlister said. “We think they've made a deal with the Nationalist Chinese. For over a month there have been reports of frantic military preparations on Formosa. In the oh-so-glorious memory of Chiang Kai-shek, they evidently intend to reconquer the homeland.”

“Jesus!” The implications became more staggering by the moment. In twenty years of day-to-day contact with the world of high-power espionage, Canning had never heard, had never conceived, of the agency's getting involved in an operation as crazy as this one. Blackmail of domestic and foreign politicians, yes. The overthrow of a small South American or African nation, yes. Political assassination at home and abroad, yes. But he had never imagined that any element within the agency, no matter how fascistic and fanatical, would try to upset the delicate balance of world power all on its own hook. “But even if the operation were a success and the Nationalists reoccupied the mainland—”

“We'd be on the brink of World War Three,” McAlister finished for him. “The Russians would figure that if we used that sort of weapon against China, we'd use it against them too. They'd be very tense. And rightfully so. The first time that Moscow suffered an epidemic of ordinary influenza, the first time a high Party official got a bad cold, they'd think they were under attack. They'd strike back at us with biological and nuclear weapons. No doubt about it.” Beneath his Palm Beach tan, his pallor deepened. “We have to stop Dragonfly.”

Canning went to the bar in the living room and came back with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. He got four ice cubes from the refrigerator, popped them into the glasses, and poured two or three shots into each glass.

Picking up his Scotch, McAlister said, “I'm really not that much of a drinking man.”

“Neither am I.”

They both drank.

Canning sat down again.

The rain continued to snap against the windows. Lightning cracked across the black sky and threw flickering shadows onto the top of the kitchen table.

When he had nearly finished his Scotch, McAlister said, “You said you thought you knew how Dragonfly, the Chinese carrier, had been chosen and set up.”

Clearing his throat on the first few words, Canning said, “If only the Party elite is to be killed, then Dragonfly has to be someone who has contact with a number of men at the top of the Chinese government. He has to be someone who would spread the plague in the right circles.”

“That really doesn't narrow it down too much. Fully half the Chinese who visit the U.S. and Canada are high Party officials themselves.”

Canning said, “I'm not trying to pinpoint a suspect. I'm just trying to see if I can reconstruct the way Wilson set it up.” He folded his hands on the table in front of him. He never gestured when he talked. Outwardly, except for the cleaning and polishing and lint-picking, he was not a nervous man. “To start with, Wilson needed a carrier. For the purpose of this discussion, let's say he picked someone from that group of trade negotiators you mentioned a while ago.”

“There were a couple of hundred more likely targets available,” McAlister said. “It would have been easier to get to someone in the symphony orchestra, for example. At least ten of the musicians were from families that wield political power in Peking. But for the moment, let's say that it was someone from the trade negotiators.”

“We ought to have a name for him,” Canning said. “How about Charlie Chan?” He wasn't trying to be funny; it was the first name that came to mind.

“All right. How would Wilson get to Charlie Chan?”

Canning thought about it for a moment. Then: “These groups are always chaperoned by people from the State Department. Their itineraries are known. Most nights they eat dinner in a restaurant rather than at a catered banquet or in someone's private home. Since the itinerary would usually be made out days before the Chinese arrived, the agency could easily learn the names of the restaurants well ahead of time. Members of The Committee, with all the right credentials for agency men, would approach the owner of one of these restaurants, feed him some solemn bullshit about national security, and get his permission to put a couple of operatives in the kitchen. Better yet, a Committeeman would be the waiter who serves Charlie Chan.”

McAlister didn't object to the scenario.

Staring at the rain that trickled down the window, Canning laid out Wilson's plan as quickly and neatly as he would have peeled and sectioned an orange. In a perverse way he was enjoying himself. This was what he had been born to do. After all those stifling years at the White House, he was back in action and glad of it “In his coffee or dessert Charlie Chan receives a fairly powerful but slow-acting sedative. Around nine-thirty, half an hour after he consumes it, Charlie pleads exhaustion and returns to his hotel room even if something else has been arranged for the rest of the night. By ten-thirty he's sleeping soundly. Three or four agents enter his room, pack him in a crate or shipping trunk, and take him out of the hotel. By midnight he's lying unconscious on an operating table in Wilson's lab.”

Reaming out the bowl of his pipe with a small gold-plated blade, McAlister said, “So far I believe you've got it right. I can't be sure. Berlinson wasn't in the lab. He wasn't one of the agents who took Charlie out of the hotel in a shipping trunk. But he was a friend of Wilson's. He pieced together bits of information that he picked up from the good doctor. So far you sound like you're his echo. Go on.”

Canning closed his eyes and could see the laboratory where it happened: cool fluorescent light that sharpened the edges of cabinets and cupboards, tables and machines; white tile walls and a tile floor; a yellow-skinned man lying nude on a cushioned operating table; half a dozen men dressed in hospital greens; murmured conversation rich with tension and excitemerit; the stench of antiseptic cleaning compounds and the sharp tang of alcohol like a knife slicing the air… “Wilson makes a half-inch incision in Charlie. Where it won't show. In an armpit. Or in the fold of the buttocks. Or maybe high on the inside of a thigh. Then he inserts the spansule.”

“Only the spansule?”

Canning, his eyes still closed, could see it: a blue-white capsule no more than half an inch in length, a quarter of an inch in diameter. “Yes. Nothing else.”

“Won't there be a mechanism to puncture the spansule and free the microorganisms when the time comes for that?”

“You said this entire thing was of a material that won't show up on an X-ray?”

“That's correct.”

“Then there can't be any metal to it. And any mechanism that was meant to puncture the spansule on, say, the receival of a certain radio signal, would have metal in it. So there's just the spansule, the capsule, that little cylinder of plastic.”

Finished with his pipe, McAlister put it in a jacket pocket and looked for something else to do with his hands. “Continue,” he said.

“The spansule fits less than an inch below the skin. When it's in place, Wilson sews up the incision — using sutures that'll dissolve by the time the healing's complete, a week at most — and places an ordinary Band-Aid over it.” He paused to think, and while he thought he used one finger to draw a Band-Aid in the finely beaded moisture that had filmed the inside of several kitchen windowpanes. “Then I suppose Charlie would be given a second drug to wake him up — but he'd be put into an hypnotic trance before he really knew where he was or what was happening to him. Wilson would have to spend the rest of the night clearing Charlie's memory and implanting a series of directives in his deep subconscious mind. Like… telling him that he will not see or feel the incision when he wakes up in the morning. And he'd have to be told when and how he's to break open the spansule.”

“All this would be done just with hypnosis?”

“Since 1963 or thereabouts, we've had drugs that condition the mind for hypnotic suggestion,” Canning said. “I used them when I was in Asia. The Committeemen would have used them on Charlie Chan. With the drugs it's not just hypnotic suggestion, it's sophisticated brainwashing.”

“You're still echoing Berlinson. But how do you think they'd eventually trigger Charlie?”

“You sound as if you don't know.”

“I don't. Berlinson made a good guess. I've talked with some of the experts in the field, and I have a fair idea. But I don't know.”

“It would have to be a verbal trigger. A key phrase,” Canning said. “When he hears it, Dragonfly will… detonate himself. Or maybe all he has to do is read the phrase in a letter.”

“No good,” McAlister said. “The letter, I mean. You forget that China is a totalitarian society. All mail going into China is opened and read. And most of it is destroyed no matter how harmless it might be.”

“Then whoever triggers Dragonfly will be inside China already, and he'll do it either in person or on the telephone.”

“We feel it'll be in person.”

“One of our agents,” Canning said.

“Yes.”

“How many do we have in China?”

“Three. Any one of them could be a Committeeman.”

“Or all of them.”

Reluctantly, McAlister agreed.

Increasingly excited about the assignment, Canning got up and began to pace. “Let's go back to the laboratory and pick up where we left off. Through a drug-induced hypnosis, Charlie has been programmed with all necessary directives. Next, he is told to fall asleep and not to wake up until his hotel-room telephone rings in the morning. Before dawn, he is returned to his room. He wakes up a few hours later, knowing nothing and feeling nothing about last night. Sooner or later he goes back to China. He lives precisely as he would have done had Wilson chosen someone else. Then one day a man walks up to him on the street, says the key phrase, and walks away. Per his program, Charlie goes home, where he has privacy of a sort. He breaks the capsule. Then he goes about his business as if it's just another day. He still remembers nothing — not the man on the street who triggered him, not Wilson, not the microorganisms that are breeding within him, nothing! In twenty-four hours he'll infect two or three hundred government people, who will pass the plague on to hundreds more, thousands more, before the virus dies out.”

McAlister rose, picked up the ashtray and carried it to the wastecan, where he emptied it. “The spansule won't show up in an X-ray. The petro-plastic lets the rays pass through. There are no metal parts. We've been through this before. There are no inorganic materials other than the petro-plastic. There's nothing implanted with it to puncture it on a given signal. So how does Mr. Chan break it and infect himself once he's been triggered?”

Canning smiled. “Easy. Deep in his subconscious mind he'll know exactly where the spansule has been sewn into him. He'll feel for it and find it in a few seconds; it's less than an inch beneath the skin. He'll take a pin or a needle and prick himself, stab down far enough to pierce the wall of the spansule. Repeatedly.”

Leaning against the counter, McAlister said, “You're good.”

“Every man's good at something.” He went back to the table and sat down.

“But there's something that hasn't occurred to you,” McAlister said softly.

He met the blue eyes. He frowned. Then he scowled. “I must be rustier than I thought. They set this thing up back in January or February. It's now September twenty-ninth. Charlie Chan went home a long time ago. So what is The Committee waiting for?”

McAlister shrugged.

“Is it possible Charlie did realize what was done to him and turned himself in to the authorities the moment he was back in Peking?”

“It's possible.”

“Or maybe he was triggered — and it didn't work.”

“Maybe. But we can't risk it. Now that the Committeemen know I'm on to them, they aren't going to wait much longer. If Charlie is still a viable weapon, he'll be used within the next few days.”

“Which brings us to the last question,” Canning said.

“That is?”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

THREE

The driver, Roy Dodson, shifted his gaze from the busy superhighway to the nine-inch screen of the electronic scanner that was mounted on the console between the halves of the front seat. A blip of green light, winking like a star, had been at the center of the screen but was now moving rapidly toward the right-hand edge. Every time the light pulsed, the monitor produced a beeping signal. When the light first began to move to the right, the tone of the signal had changed; and it was this new sound that had caused the driver to take a look at the screen. “He's on an exit ramp,” Dodson said.

They were heading south on rain-washed Interstate 95, more than thirty miles from Washington and forty miles from the point at which they had begun to follow Robert McAlister. Traffic was moderately heavy. Hundreds of big trucks were working down toward Richmond and Norfolk. McAlister's white Mercedes was one mile ahead of them, as it had been ever since they'd begun to tail it. They couldn't see it at this distance, of course. But thanks to the electronic gear, there was no need for them to keep the other car in sight.

“Close in on him,” the passenger said. He was a heavy-set man with a dour face and a hard, no-nonsense voice.

Dodson depressed the accelerator, swung the Thunderbird into the passing lane, and swept around a chemical tank truck.

The light was nearly to the edge of the screen.

“Faster,” said the fat man.

Dodson jammed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The speedometer needle rose from sixty to seventy to eighty and hovered just below the ninety mark. Wind screamed along the car's streamlined flanks, and raindrops like gelatinous bullets snapped against the windshield. They passed another truck, two cars, and a motor home. The Thunderbird began to shimmy and float on the film of rain that covered the pavement. Dodson pulled out of the passing lane, then left the highway altogether, braking just as they shot into the exit ramp. The single lane curved farther to the right; the blip of green light eased back toward the center of the screen — then continued away to the left. At the foot of the ramp, not even pausing for the stop sign, Dodson turned left on the secondary road and stepped on the accelerator again. The green signal returned to the center of the monitor: the Mercedes was now directly in front of them, still out of sight beyond a low hill.

“Slow down,” the fat man said.

Dodson did as he was told. Malloy, the fat man's previous aide, had been a twenty-eight-year-old veteran of the CIA's West German office, and Malloy had not always done as he was told. Poor Malloy had not been able to understand why the fat man, who had never worked for the agency, should be in charge of the extremely important and extremely secret Committee. Malloy could see why there was a need to cooperate with wealthy and powerful civilians who were in sympathy with their goals. But having a civilian in charge of the operations was more than Malloy could stand. To become the top man's aide, he had been required to resign from the agency himself, so that no government investigation of the CIA would ever zero in on him and then move from him to his boss and to the core of the apple. Before he became the fat man's aide, Malloy had not known who was in charge, but he had thought that it was a man high in the agency or at least a former agency executive. When he learned the truth he was sullen, brusque, and rude to the very man who had brought him into the center circle of the organization. Eventually, the fat man saw that Malloy's dissatisfaction with his boss might metamorphose into total disaffection with The Committee's, program itself; therefore, Malloy was killed in an accident when his car apparently skidded on a perfectly dry roadbed and collided with a telephone pole outside of Alexandria, Virginia. Roy Dod-son knew precisely what had happened to his predecessor and why; his boss had told him all about it the first day that Dodson had come to work. No matter what he might think of the fat man, Dodson did as he was told, always had and always would.

Just before they reached the crest of the hill, the green blip moved sharply to the right on the monitor. Then it disappeared past the edge, although the dark screen continued to produce a faint beep-beep-beep.

Topping the hill they saw a large truck stop — twenty gasoline pumps on five widely spaced concrete islands, a service garage, three automatic truck-washing bays, a truckers' motel, and restaurant — on the right side of the road. The huge parking lot contained sixty or seventy tractor-trailer rigs.

“No Mercedes,” Dodson said.

“He might have driven behind the buildings or in among all those trucks.”

They drove through the nearest entrance and past the fueling stations where a dozen pump jockeys in bright yellow hooded rain slickers were tending to half a dozen trucks. Following the chain-link fence that encircled the property, they went around to the rear of the restaurant and the small, rather shabby motel. The beep-beep-beep, in counterpoint to the thumping windshield wipers, grew somewhat louder, and the light returned to the edge of the monitor — but there was no Mercedes here. On the south side of the complex, they cruised slowly down an aisle between the two rows of parked trucks — dull gray tailgates on both sides — which loomed like parading elephants. The signal was getting stronger by the second; the light edged back into the center of the screen. The beeping became so loud that it hurt their ears. Halfway down the aisle Dodson stopped the car and said, “We're almost on top of it.”

There was nothing around them except trucks.

Barely able to control his anger, the fat man said, “Which one is it?”

Putting the car in gear and letting it drift forward, Dodson studied the monitor on the console. Then he slipped the car into reverse and let it roll backward while he watched the green blip. At last he stopped again and pointed at a tractor-trailer that had sea-train painted on the rear door. “McAlister must have found the gimmick on his Mercedes and switched it to this truck. We've been following a decoy.”

Suddenly, without warning, the fat man raised his arms and leaned slightly forward and slammed both heavy fists into the top of the padded dashboard. Inside the closed car the blow reverberated like a note from a bass drum: and then a whole rhythm, a series of solid thumps. The fat man had gone berserk. His arms were like windmill blades. He hammered, hammered, cursed, hammered, growled wordlessly, his voice like an animal's snarl, and hammered some more. His face was an apoplectic red, and hundreds of beads of sweat popped out on his brow. His eyes bulged as if they were being pushed out of him by some incredible inner pressure. The blood vessels at his temples stood up like ropes. He pounded the dashboard again and again, harder and harder… Beneath the padding the thin sheet metal began to bend. The fat man had tremendous strength in his thick arms. The dash sagged under the furious blows. Then, as suddenly as he had begun, he quit. He leaned back in his seat, breathing heavily, and stared out at the gray rain and the gray trucks and the wet black macadam.

Stunned, Dodson said, “Sir?”

“Get us the hell out of here.”

Dodson hesitated.

“Now, damn you!”

Most of the way back to Washington, the fat man said nothing. He wasn't embarrassed, and he wasn't angry with Dodson. He was angry with himself. He'd had these rages before. Quite a few times, in fact. This was the first time, however, that anyone had seen him lose control. Always before, when he had felt that overpowering need to smash something with his fists, he had been able to wait until he was alone. Or with some whore. Over the last several days he had been under unbearable pressure. He never knew what that damned McAlister might do next. Keeping one step ahead of the bastard had been horribly difficult. And now he seemed to be one step behind. So this time he hadn't been able to go off by himself and work off his frustrations unobserved. He'd exploded, much to his own surprise, in front of Dodson. It was frightening. He simply could not let go like that when anyone was around, not again, not even for an instant.

As they entered the Washington suburbs, the fat man said, “Well, we know he's got someone he trusts to send to Peking.”

Dodson glanced nervously at his boss. “We do?”

“Yes. We can deduce that much from his switching the transmitter to the truck. If he hadn't been rendezvousing with an agent, he'd have let us waste time and manpower following him.”

“That makes sense, I guess.”

“I'll find out who his man is. Before the day's over. One way or another, I'll find out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It's just that if we could have learned his name now, this morning, we'd have more time to — eliminate him.”

Dodson licked his lips. Hesitantly, he said, “If we can't find out who he's sending to China — what then?”

“Then, somehow we've got to activate Dragonfly immediately.”

The rain had let up. Dodson put the windshield wipers on the lowest speed. “I've never been told what Dragonfly is.”

“I know,” the fat man said.

FOUR

When McAlister first arrived at the G Street apartment, David Canning was like a patch of barren earth: gray soil, ashes, broken twigs, cinders, and pebbles. The gray soil was his current uneventful career at the White House. The ashes were of his marriage. And the rest of it was the detritus of a day-to-day existence which held little excitement and no meaning. When he realized that McAlister had a new job for him, it was as if a green shoot had appeared in the barren earth. And now, a short while later, as McAlister began to explain the nature of the assignment, the shoot soared up and opened with leaves and budded and blossomed. Canning suddenly felt alive for the first time in years. “We've already alerted Peking,” McAlister said. He came back to the kitchen table and sat down across from Canning. “General Lin Shen Yang, head of their Internal Security Force, has ordered a thorough physical examination for every one of the five hundred and nine Chinese citizens who visited North America during January and February. We've told them that's the wrong approach. No physical examination is going to unmask Dragonfly. If it were that easy to defuse the operation, Olin Wilson wouldn't have bothered with it.”

“Have you given General Lin the names of the three agents we have in China?” Canning asked.

“Good Lord, no!” His blue eyes were big and round, like a pair of robin eggs. “Whether or not they're Committeemen, we can't let our men be grilled by Chinese intelligence experts. They'd find out who Dragonfly is — but they'd also learn everything worth knowing about our operations within their borders. No matter how tough an agent is, he can be broken if the interrogator uses a combination of extreme torture and drugs.”

“Of course.”

“Our entire Chinese network would be blown to pieces.”

Canning nodded agreement. “And any Chinese citizens who have been cooperating with our agents would be rounded up and imprisoned. 'Reeducated' to better serve the People's Republic.”

“Exactly. And we'd probably suffer damage to our primary networks in most of Asia. Furthermore, if one of these three men is a Committeeman, and if he knows about some of these other things I've alluded to… Well, just imagine what the Chinese could do with that sort of information.”

Rubbing one hand over his long and bony jaw, fingering the vague dimple in his chin, Canning thought for a moment and then said, “So you have to send a man to Peking to help General Lin find the Committeeman and, through him, Dragonfly.”

“Yes.”

“And I'm the man.”

“As I've said, you're the only one I can trust.”

“The Chinese are expecting me?”

“They're expecting someone. Right now, I'm the only one who knows it'll be you. They won't get your name until they absolutely have to have it. The longer I can play this close to my vest, the longer it will take The Committee to find out just how much I know and what I'm going to do about it.”

“What happens when I get to Peking? How close to the vest do I play it?”

McAlister took his pipe out of his pocket again. He didn't fill and light it this time. He just kept turning it over and over in his hands. “You'll know the names of the three agents we have in China, but you won't reveal them all at once to General Lin. Instead, you'll provide him with one name at a tune.”

“So he'll still need me.”

“Yes.”

“After I've given him a name?”

“You will accompany him when he takes the operative into custody. You will see that he brings that man directly to the United States consulate. There, with General Lin participating only as an observer, you will question our operative, using a sophisticated polygraph which is already security-sealed and on a plane en route to our consul in Peking. If the agent is not a Committeeman, if the polygraph shows that he knows nothing whatsoever about Dragonfly, then you will see that he is held under armed guard within the diplomatic compound until he can be flown back to Washington. Under no circumstances must the Chinese get their hands on him. Then you will move on to the next agent on the list. In each case, even when you discover the Committeeman, you will not permit Lin to be alone with our man, and you will see that the agent is whisked out of China on the first available flight of any United States government aircraft. If the first agent you interrogate happens to be the Committeeman, the trigger man for Dragonfly, you will not reveal any more names to General Lin, of course.”

File drawers opened and dozens of phantom secretaries moved busily back and forth across the ethereal office in Canning's mind. “The Chinese are going to go along with this? They aren't going to seize the opportunity to discover which of their own people have been passing information to us?”

“They have no choice but to handle it our way.”

“I'll be on their turf.”

“Yes, but we could always just leave them to find Dragonfly on their own — which they simply cannot do.”

“That's a bluff.”

“It is,” McAlister admitted.

“And they'll know it's a bluff.”

McAlister shook his head no. “Regardless of what the newspapers may print about it, the great détente between the United States and the People's Republic of China is quite fragile. Oh, sure, most of the Chinese people want peace. They really aren't all that imperialistic. They want open trade with us. But the great majority of the Party leaders don't trust us. Not the least bit. God knows, they have good reason. But with most government officials, the distrust has grown into paranoia. They wouldn't find it hard to believe that we'd let Dragonfly strike, because they're certain that we'd like to split their country between ourselves and the Russians.”

“They actually think we're all wild-eyed reactionaries?”

“They suspect that we are. And for most of them, suspicion is as good as proof. If he believes you're capable of committing the most despicable acts against China, General Lin won't push you too far. He'll believe your threats if you have to make them.”

“But don't threaten him lightly?”

“Yes. Diplomacy is always best.”

Canning's eyes were a crystalline shade of gray. Ordinarily they contained a sharp cold edge that most men could not meet directly. At the moment, however, his eyes were like pools of molten metal: warm, glistening, mercurial. “When do I leave?”

“Four o'clock this afternoon.”

“Straight to Peking?”

“No. You'll catch a domestic flight to Los Angeles.” McAlister took a folder of airplane tickets from an inner jacket pocket and laid it on the table. “From L.A. you'll take another flight to Tokyo. There's only a one-hour layover in Los Angeles. It's an exhausting trip. But tomorrow night you'll rest up in Tokyo. Friday morning you'll board a jet belonging to a French corporation, and that'll take you secretly to Peking.”

Canning shook his head as if he were having trouble with his hearing. “I don't understand. Why not a government plane direct to Peking?”

“For one thing, I'd have to go through the usual channels to get you a seat. Or the President could go through them for me, with no need to explain anything to anyone. But either way, The Committee would learn about it. And if they knew… Well, I'm not so sure you would ever get to Peking.”

“I can handle myself,” Canning said, not boasting at all, just stating a fact.

“I know you can. But can you handle a bomb explosion aboard your airplane while it's over the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from land? Remember Berlinson?”

“Your informer?”

Jagged lightning, like a dynamite blast in a bus-terminal locker, slammed across the purplish sky. The stroboscopic effect pierced the window and filled the kitchen with leaping shadows and knife-blade light. The crack of thunder followed an instant later — and there was an electric power failure. The refrigerator stopped humming and rattling. The fluorescent tubes above the kitchen counter blinked out.

The meager, penumbral light of the early-afternoon storm sky, further filtered by the misted window, left them dressed in shadows.

“Do you have any candles?” McAlister asked.

“Let's give them a few minutes to fix it. You were explaining why you think these Committeemen would go to any lengths to kill me. It has something to do with Berlinson…”

McAlister sighed. “Once he had whetted my appetite by telling me a bit about Dragonfly, I promised Roger Berlinson three things in return for the rest of his information: exemption from criminal prosecution for anything he did as a CIA operative; a rather large cash payment; and last of all, a new name and a whole new life for him and his family. So… After he told me what he knew, I went to Ryder, the new FBI director, and I asked him for the use of an FBI safe house. I told him I needed it for a man whose name and circumstances I could not divulge. I explained that Ryder himself was the only man in the Bureau who could know the safe house was harboring someone I wanted to protect. Ryder was great: no questions, complete cooperation. The Berlinsons were spirited out of Washington and, by devious route, ended up in Carpinteria, California. So far as the FBI agents knew, Berlinson was a Mafia figure who had ratted on his bosses. Meanwhile, I went to various non-agency sources to obtain new birth certificates, passports, credit cards, and other documents for Roger, his wife, and his son. But I was wasting my time.”

“They killed Berlinson.”

His voice leaden, McAlister said, “The house in Carpinteria was protected by an infrared alarm system. It seemed as safe as a Swiss bank. What I didn't know, what the FBI didn't know, was that the Army has recently perfected a 'thermal isolation' suit that is one hundred percent effective in containing heat. It can be used by commandos to slip past infrared equipment. Two of these suits were stolen from an Army-CIA experimental lab in MacLean, Virginia.” He stopped for a moment as thunder rattled the windowpanes. It was convenient thunder, Canning thought, for McAlister needed to compose himself and clear his phlegm-filled throat. Then: “You can spend only twenty minutes inside the suit, because your body heat builds and builds in there until it can roast you alive. But twenty minutes is sufficient. We believe two men, wearing these suits, entered the Carpinteria house through a living-room window. Inside, they quietly stripped down to their street clothes before they broiled in their own juices. Then they went out to the kitchen and murdered the FBI agent who was monitoring the infrared repeater screens. When he was out of the way, they went upstairs and shot Berlinson, his wife, and his son.”

The only sounds were those of the storm. The heavy dark air could not hold the words McAlister had spoken, but it did retain the anguish with which they'd been freighted.

Canning said, “Families are never hit.”

“We're dealing with fanatics.”

“But what did they have to gain by killing the wife and son?”

“They probably wanted to set an example for anyone else who might be thinking of informing on The Committee.”

Recalling Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby, Canning decided that such a thing was not only possible but likely. “Lunatics!”

“The point is, if they would do a thing like this, then they wouldn't hesitate to blow up a government aircraft, passengers and crew, just to get you. We must keep your involvement a secret until you're safely inside China. If they kill you, I've got no one else I can send. I'll have to go myself. And they'll kill me.”

“But why don't they just trigger Dragonfly? Why don't they get it over with before we can stop them?”

“That's the one thing that doesn't make sense,” McAlister said. “I just don't know the answer.”

It was a paranoid nightmare.

Yet Canning believed every word of it.

Orange-red numerals suddenly glowed in the shadows. McAlister checked his electronic read-out watch and said, “We don't have much time left.”

“If we're taking all these precautions,” Canning said, “then I assume I'll be traveling under another identity.”

Reaching into an inside pocket of his suit coat, McAlister produced a passport, birth certificate, and other identification. He passed the lot to Canning, who didn't bother to try to examine it in the poor light. “Your name's Theodore Otley. You're a diplomatic courier for the State Department.”

Canning was surprised. “Wouldn't it be better for me to go as an ordinary citizen? Less conspicuous that way.”

“Probably,” McAlister agreed. “But an ordinary citizen has to pass through anti-hijacking X-ray machines and later through customs. He can't carry a gun. A diplomatic courier, however, is exempt from all inspections. And this one time you don't want to be without a gun.”

Like a blind man reading Braille, Canning paged through the passport. “Where did you get this stuff? Any chance The Committee will learn about old Ted Otley?”

“In the last few months I've learned a few things. I know that only three intelligence agencies in the world have kept the CIA from planting a double agent. The Israelis run a tight outfit. So do the French. The British are the best, most efficient, most impenetrable intelligence specialists anywhere, period. I went to my opposite in Britain's SIS, what used to be called M.I.6. I asked for and was granted a favor: one full set of papers in the Otley name. There is no way The Committee can crack it.”

Canning knew that was true. “Theodore Otley it is.”

“When you get to Tokyo you will check into the Imperial Hotel, where reservations have been made.”

“The Imperial?” Canning asked, amazed. “Since when does a lowly op rate that kind of luxury?”

“Since never. That's why you're getting it. In other Tokyo hotels — the Grand Palace, Takanawa Prince, Fairmont, just about anywhere — you might run into an agent who knows you. There's not much chance of that if you stay at the Imperial.”

“What about the French jet? How do I connect with it?”

“That will be taken care of by your assistant.”

Canning blinked. “Assistant?”

“You don't speak Chinese. You'll need an interpreter.”

“General Lin speaks no English?”

“He does. But you don't want to be completely cut out of a conversation when he uses Chinese with his subordinates.”

“I don't like it,” Canning said sourly.

“The interpreter isn't an agency rep. I'm not tying you to a possible Committeeman.”

“A tenderfoot is just as bad.”

“Hardly. Once you're inside China, there won't be any guns or knives or rough stuff. A tenderfoot can handle it.”

“Who is he?”

“This is strictly a need-to-know operation, and you don't need to know the name. I'm especially concerned that no harm should come to the interpreter. They can't torture a name from you if you haven't got it.”

Resigned to it, Canning said, “How do I contact him?”

McAlister smiled, obviously amused. “He'll contact you.”

“What's so funny?”

“You'll find out.'

“What I don't need is surprises.”

“This one's pleasant. And remember: 'need-to-know.' ”

The electric power came back into service. The refrigerator rumbled to life, and the living-room lights popped on like flash bulbs. Canning got up, went to the kitchen counter, worked the light switch until the fluorescent tubes fired up. He and McAlister squinted at each other for a few seconds.

McAlister stood up and stretched. If he had been all lion when he had come through the front door, Canning thought, he was now at least ten percent tired old house cat. “That's everything. You have any questions?”

“Are you going to be working on the case from this end?”

“I've built up a rather large, youngish, go-getting legal staff since I took over at the agency. I'm going to turn those lawyers into detectives.”

“You could get them killed.”

“Not if I send them out in teams of two and three, and not if there's an armed United States marshal with each team.”

“You can swing that?”

Adjusting his cuffs, McAlister said, “The President has promised me anything I need.”

“Where will you start?”

“We'll try to find Wilson's laboratory. If we can get our hands on the files or on a scientist who worked with Wilson, we ought to be able to learn Dragonfly's identity.” He led the way into the living room and waited while Canning got his raincoat from the foyer closet. “There's another angle we'll cover. Berlinson managed to kill one of the men sent to get him. The corpse wasn't in the house in Carpinteria, but our forensic experts swear there was a fifth killing. There was a great deal of blood near the bedroom closet, and it doesn't match types with any of the Berlinsons or with the FBI agent who was killed in the kitchen. So… Somewhere there's a dead CIA operative, a dead Committeeman. I'm going to try to pin down the whereabouts of every agent who is supposed to be in Mexico or North America, any agent who might have slipped into Carpinteria, California. If one of them isn't where he's supposed to be, if his absence is unexplained, if I can't get a line on him one way or another, then we can be pretty certain that he's the one Berlinson killed. We'll find out which agency employees were most friendly with him. They'll probably be Committeemen. With luck, we might get hold of one of these fanatics before he knows what's happening.”

Canning held the hooded raincoat, waited until the other man had his arms in the sleeves, let go of the collar, and said, “Then what?”

McAlister turned around to face him. Buttoning his coat, he said, “We interrogate him.”

“Oh?”

“We learn who runs The Committee.”

“If he knows.”

“Or we see if he can tell us where Wilson had his lab. Or who Dragonfly is.”

“If he knows.”

“He'll know something.”

Putting one hand on the doorknob but making no effort to turn it, Canning said, “Like you said earlier, these are all tough boys, hard cases. They won't break unless you hit them with a combination of extreme torture and drugs.”

“That's right.”

“You aren't the kind of man who could use those techniques.”

McAlister frowned. “Maybe I could.”

“I hope you don't have to. But I hope you can if it comes to that.”

“I can. If it gets down to the wire.”

“If it gets down to the wire,” Canning said, “it's already too late.”

FIVE

At one-twenty that afternoon McAlister entrusted his Mercedes to a federal security officer and hurried toward a side entrance of the White House. The enormous old building, streaming with rain, looked like a piece of elegantly sculptured alabaster. All over the spacious grounds, the trees of many nations shared a common autumn: the leaves had begun to turn a hundred different shades of red and gold. McAlister was not aware of this beauty. His mind was on the Dragonfly crisis. He went straight to the door, exchanged hellos with the guard, and stepped into a small marbled foyer, where he left puddles of rain on the polished floor.

Beau Jackson, the sixty-year-old tuxedoed black man who was on duty at the cloakroom, gave McAlister a toothy smile. Jackson was an anachronism that never failed to intrigue McAlister. His look and his manner seemed pre-Lincolnian. “Nasty out there, Mr. McAlister?”

“Wet enough to drown ducks, Mr. Jackson.”

The black man laughed as he took McAlister's coat. Hanging it up, he said, “You just hold on a minute, and I'll wipe the rain off your attaché case.”

“Oh, I'll get it,” McAlister said, putting the briefcase on a small mahogany stand and reaching for the display handkerchief that was folded to a perfect double point in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

“No, no!” Jackson said urgently. “You mustn't mess up your nice hanky, Mr. McAlister.”

“Really, I—”

“Why, you have it folded so nice…” He tilted his graying head to admire the handkerchief. “Look at them folds. Would you look at them folds? Sharp enough to cut bread.”

McAlister smiled and shook his head. “Okay. I'll use the bathroom.” He went into the visitors' lavatory, splashed cold water on his face, combed his hair, and straightened his tie. When he returned to the cloakroom, he found Jackson folding the dustcloth he had used to wipe off the attaché case. “Thank you, Mr. Jackson.”

“You're welcome, I'm sure.”

He picked up the case. “How's that son of yours getting along? The one who was trying to buy a McDonald's franchise.”

Jackson smiled, “He got the store all right. He's deep in debt, but he's working sixteen hours a day and selling hamburgers faster than they can kill the cows to make them.”

McAlister laughed. “Good for him.”

“Have a nice visit with the boss,” Jackson said.

“That's up to him.”

Five minutes later, passed along by the appointments secretary, McAlister stood outside the door to the Oval Office. He hesitated, trying to relax, trying to get a smile on his face.

On his left, three feet away, the ever-present warrant officer sat on a chair in the hallway. On his lap lay a black metal case, The Bag, the file of war codes that the President needed if he were to start — or finish — a nuclear war. Thirtyish, clean-cut and lean, the warrant officer was reading a paperback suspense novel. It had a colorful cover: two people running from an unseen enemy. Above the title was a line of copy: “Unarmed in the desert — with hired killers on their trail.” Without looking up, thoroughly hooked, the Bag Man turned a page. McAlister wondered how a man who might one day help to cause mega-deaths could possibly be enthralled by a fiction in which only two lives hung in the balance.

He knocked on the door, opened it, and went in to see the President.

The Oval Office was quintessentially American. It was clearly a room where business was transacted and not merely a place set aside for ceremonial purposes. The furniture was expensive, often antique, but also sturdy and functional. A United States flag hung from a brass stand at the right and behind the chief executive's desk, as if everyone had to be reminded this was not Lithuania or Argentina. Every corner and glossy surface was squeaky clean. The room held a vaguely medicinal odor composed of furniture polish, carpet shampoo, and chemically purified, dehumidified air. The ubiquitous blue-and-silver Great Seal of the President of the United States officialized the carpet, the desk, the penholder that stood on the desk, the pens in the holder, the stationery, the stapler, the blotter, each of the many telephones, the sterling-silver pitcher full of ice water, and a dozen other things. Only American chiefs of staff, McAlister thought, could wield so much power and yet cling to such simple-minded status symbols as these.

The focal point of the office was, of course, the President. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man who managed to look austere and approachable, sophisticated and of simple tastes, fatherly and quite sensual all at the same time. In spite of his London-tailored suit and hand-stitched Italian shoes, he had the rugged, rangy image of a cowboy actor. His hair was thick, salt-and-pepper, artfully mussed; and his eyebrows were dark and bushy. And he had the best collection of vintage 1960, white-white, porcelain-capped, steel-pin, jaw-sunk, permanently implanted, artificial teeth extant.

“Good to see you, Bob,” he said, coming out from behind his desk, his right hand extended, his teeth gleaming.

“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” McAlister said as they shook hands. The elaborate, long-time-no-see greeting made McAlister ill-at-ease, for he'd spent an hour with the President just last evening.

“Nasty out there, Bob?”

“Wet enough to drown ducks, Mr. President,” McAlister said, listening to the other man laugh, remembering Beau Jackson, wondering if there was actually all that much difference between a cloakroom attendant and a chief of state.

The only other person present was Andrew Rice, the President's number-one man. To his credit, he didn't laugh at the duck joke; and Ms handshake was softer than the President's; and he had imperfect teeth. McAlister didn't particularly like the man, but he respected him. Which was exactly how he felt about the President, too.

“You look as exhausted as I feel,” Rice said.

“When this is over,” McAlister said, “I'm for the Caribbean.”

As Rice groaned and shifted and tried to get comfortable in his chair, McAlister wondered what David Canning, compulsively neat as he was, would think of the senior advisor. Rice's gray suit looked as if it had been put through a series of endurance tests by the idealists at the Consumer's Union. His white shirt was yellow-gray, his collar frayed. His striped tie was stained, and the knot had been tied haphazardly. Standing five ten, weighing two-eighty, he was easily a hundred pounds too heavy. The chair creaked under him, and just the effort of getting settled down had made him breathe like a runner.

Of course, Rice's mind was quick, spare, and ordered. He was one of the country's sharpest liberal thinkers. He had been twenty-six when Harvard University Press published his first book, Balancing the Budget in a Welfare State, and he had been electrifying political and economic circles ever since.

“I received your brief report of this morning's tragedy in Carpinteria,” the President said. “I called Bill Ryder at the Bureau to find out how in hell his security was breached. He didn't know.”

“We made a mistake putting Ryder at the FBI,” Rice said.

The President allowed as how his senior advisor might be right.

“Berlinson, Carpinteria… all of that's become moot,” McAlister said. “Mr President, have you had any new communications with Peking?”

“Thanks to a satellite relay, I had a twenty-minute talk with the Chairman a short while ago.” The President put a finger in one ear and searched for wax. “The Chairman isn't happy.” He took the finger out of his ear and studied it: no wax. He tried the other ear. “He half believes that the entire Dragonfly hysteria is a trick of some sort. They've examined about half of the five hundred and nine suspects, and they haven't found anything yet.”

“Nor will they,” McAlister said.

“The Chairman explained to me that if a plague should strike Peking, he will have no choice but to target all of China's nuclear missiles on our West Coast.” The President found no wax in the second ear.

“Their ballistics system is antiquated,” Rice said. “Their nuclear capabilities don't amount to much.” He dismissed the Chinese with one quick wave of his pudgy hand.

“True enough,” the President said. Dissatisfied with the results of the first exploration, he began to make another search of his ears, beginning again with the left one. “Our anti-missile system can stop anything they throw at us. They don't have a saturation system like Russia does. We'll intercept two or three hundred miles from shore. But the fallout won't leave either Los Angeles or San Francisco very damned healthy.”

Rice turned to McAlister. “The Chairman wants to know the name of the agent you're sending over to General Lin.”

“They want time to run their own background check on him,” the President said, giving up on his waxless ears and drumming his fingers on the desk. “They haven't said as much. But that's what I'd want to do if the roles were reversed.”

“The only problem is that The Committee may be able to monitor all communications between us and the Chinese,” McAlister said softly, worriedly.

“Not likely,” Rice said.

“It would go out on the red phone,” the President said. “That line can't be tapped.”

“Any line can be tapped,” McAlister said.

The President's jaw set like rough-formed concrete.

“The red phone is secure.”

“I'm not questioning your word, Mr. President,” McAlister said. “But even if the red phone is safe, we can get my man killed by giving his name to the Chinese too early in the game. The Committee will have sources in China's counterintelligence establishment. Once the Chinese have the name and start running a background check, The Committee will know who I'm sending. They'll have my man hit before he's safe in Peking.”

“For God's sake!” Rice said, huffing with frustration. “Look, we're dealing with dangerous, crackpot reactionaries who have gotten deep into the CIA, perhaps deep into the FBI as well. For fifteen years now they've corrupted the democratic process. I think we all agree on that. We all understand what a grave matter this is. But these Committeemen aren't omniscient! They aren't lurking everywhere/”

“I'd prefer to act as if they were,” McAlister said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

The President continued to drum his fingers on the desk, using his left hand to counterpoint the rhythm he had developed with his right. He looked at McAlister from under his bushy eyebrows and said, “I think Andy's right about this.”

“Caution is admirable,” Rice said. “But we've got to guard against paranoia.”

The President nodded.

Wondering if he had gotten into a position where he would once again have to defy a President or resign his office, McAlister said, “I don't want to transmit my man's name to the Chinese any sooner than twelve hours before he's due in Peking. That's cutting it close enough so that The Committee won't have time to organize a hit.”

“Twelve hours,” the President said.

“The Chairman won't like that,” Rice said. His small, deep-set eyes and his pursed lips admonished McAlister.

“Whether or not he likes it, that's the way I want it.”

Rice's face was gradually mottling: red, pink, and chalk-white. He was like a malfunctioning boiler swelling up with steam. A rivet would pop any second now.

In a surprisingly quiet voice the President said, “From the way you're talking, Bob, I assume that you've found a man you think you can trust.”

“That's right, sir.”

Taking his cue from the President, Rice controlled his anger. “An agency man?”

McAlister told them how his morning had gone thus far: a visit to the British Embassy to pick up the set of forged papers that the SIS had prepared for him, a thorough search of his Mercedes until he located the transmitter he had known would be there, a quick switch of the transmitter to the tractor-trailer that had stopped for a red light, a meeting with the agent who would be sent to China…

While McAlister talked, the President used a thumbnail to pick incessantly at his artificial teeth. He made a continual click-click-click noise. Occasionally he found a bit of tartar, which he carefully inspected. In public McAlister had never seen the man pick his teeth or bore at his ears or clean his fingernails or crack his knuckles or pick his nose. And even in the Oval Office he didn't begin worrying at himself unless he was under pressure to make a policy decision. Now, wound tight by the Dragonfly crisis, he was rapidly going through his entire repertoire: he stopped picking his teeth, and he began to crack his knuckles one at a time.

When McAlister finished talking, the President said, “You've neglected to mention the agent's name.” He smiled.

Crack!: a knuckle.

“Before I tell you,” McAlister said, “I feel strongly that I should receive your assurance that you won't pass it along to the Chairman any sooner than I want it to be passed.”

Rice started to say something, decided that silence was at least valuable if not golden, and glowered at the President's hands just as another knuckle cracked.

The President got up and went to the Georgian window behind his desk. He stared at the traffic that moved through the rain down on Pennsylvania Avenue. He obviously knew, as did McAlister, that the name did not really matter. Getting the name was important not for practical reasons; it was merely a matter of face now. “What would you do if I refused to give you that assurance? Would you tell me his name — or defy me?”

“Mr. President,” McAlister said, “I would do neither.”

“Neither?”

“I would resign, sir.”

Not turning from the window, the fingers of both hands tangled behind his back and writhing like trysting worms, the President said, “That's out of the question. This has to be resolved quickly, and you're the only man I know who can handle it. You have my assurance.”

“You promise, sir?”

“Yes, Bob. The Chairman will get the name twelve hours before your man gets to Peking. My promise. Don't push it any further.”

Doggedly, McAlister said, “One step further, sir.”

The President said nothing.

McAlister said, “I wouldn't want to talk any more about this if I thought we were being recorded. The tape might get into the hands of a Committeeman.”

Turning to face them, grinning humorlessly, the President said, “Do you think any President since Nixon would be foolish enough to record his own conversations?”

McAlister nodded. “My man's name is David Canning.”

“He's on assignment here at the White House,” Rice said.

“Why Canning?” the President asked.

McAlister told him why. He also explained that Canning would travel as Theodore Otley and would leave Washington in two hours, on a four o'clock flight to Los Angeles. “I'm sending him by a series of civilian airlines, from Los Angeles to Tokyo and finally to Peking.”

“That seems a waste of time,” Rice said, shaking his head disapprovingly. “Why not lay on a direct government flight—”

“Which might easily be set up to explode over the ocean,” the President said.

“Exactly,” McAlister said. “The Committee would have to know about it. They'd either put a bomb aboard here or at a fuel stop on the way.”

Reluctantly, grudgingly, Rice said, “I suppose you're right. We've been behaving like chronic paranoids, but they've left us no other way to behave.”

The President said, “You'll be trying to break the Dragonfly project from this end?”

“Yes, sir,” McAlister said.

“Have you been doing any thinking about why Dragonfly hasn't already been triggered?”

“That's the question that kept me up most of last night,” McAlister said. “I can't find an answer I like.”

Looking at his watch, the President said, “Anything else, then? Anything more you need, Bob?”

“In fact, there is, sir,” McAlister said as he got to Ms feet.

“Name it.”

“I'd like twelve federal marshals put under my control, four men each in three eight-hour shifts. I'll need them for the protection of my investigative staff.”

Glancing at Rice, the President said, “See to that, Andy.”

Rice struggled out of his chair, which squeaked with relief. “They will be in your office tomorrow morning at eight-thirty,” he said. “You can brief them then and divide them whatever way you want.”

“Thank you.”

“And now I have a request,” the President said.

McAlister said, “Sir?”

“From now on, don't go anywhere without your bodyguard.”

“I don't plan to, sir.”

“It'll get worse. They'll get desperate the closer we get to Dragonfly.”

“I know,” McAlister said.

“My God,” Rice said, “What are we coming to when the highest officers of the land can't trust their own subordinates? These reactionary bastards have nearly driven us into a police state!”

No one had anything to say about that.

When McAlister left the Oval Office, the warrant officer looked up to see if the President might be at the open door with news of the world's end. Then he went on with his reading.

McAlister felt a bit weak behind the knees and in the pit of his stomach. He had known four Presidents and had been appointed to office by two of them. He had seen that they were all flawed, sometimes tragically so. They were all, in whole or part, vain and foolish, misinformed and sometimes even crooked. Yet he had not lost his respect for the office — perhaps because it was the keystone of that system of laws and justice which he so admired — and he stood in awe of any halfway decent man who held it. His intellect and emotions had reached a compromise on this subject, and he experienced no need to analyze his feelings. This was simply how he was, and he had grown accustomed to the weakness in his knees and stomach after every conference in the Oval Office.

Don't you know you're from a fine Boston family with a forty-foot genealogical chart? he asked himself. A Boston family. There is no better. Didn't you listen to your mother? She told you at least a million tunes. And your father. Didn't anything he said get through to you? You're Bostonian, old Bostonian! You're from the stock that patronized the Atlantic Monthly, and your father was a member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard! Don't you know that no one's better than you?

He laughed softly.

He still felt a bit weak.

When McAlister entered the back corridor, the guard at the end saw him coming and said, “Leaving now, Mr. McAlister?”

“As soon as I get my coat.”

The guard pulled on his rain slicker and went out to see that the Mercedes was brought around.

Beau Jackson was not in the cloakroom.

McAlister put down his attaché case and went to the open-front wall-length closet. As he put on his coat he noticed a thick black-and-gold hardbound book lying on the hat shelf. With the curiosity of a book lover, he picked it up and looked at the title: The Complete Kafka — The Stories, Annotated and Analyzed. On the flyleaf there was a three-inch-square bookplate:

From the Library of

b. w. jackson

Beau Jackson came out of the lavatory into the cloakroom. He stopped and stared at the book in McAlister's hands, and said, “Somebody left that here last week. It yours, Mr. McAlister?”

“Belongs to a B.W. Jackson. Know him?”

The black man smiled. “Surprise you?”

“Not really. I've always figured you can't be what you seem to be.” He put the book back on the hat shelf.

Carrying McAlister's attaché case, Jackson walked him across the cloakroom, into the hall. “Then I guess I belong here.”

McAlister pulled up his hood, buttoned his coat collar. “Oh?”

Handing him the case, Jackson said, “Around here a lot of people just aren't what they seem to be.”

Grinning, McAlister said, “You mean that you're disappointed with the way the boss has been running things? You're sorry you voted for him?”

“I did vote for him,” Jackson said. “And for once in my life I figure maybe I pulled the right lever.” His broad, dark face was sober, almost glum. “Compared to that Sidney Greenstreet of his, the boss is as real and genuine and unphony as they come.”

“Sidney Greenstreet?” McAlister said, perplexed.

At the end of the hall, the guard came back inside and said, “Car's ready, Mr. McAlister.”

“Who's Sidney Greenstreet?” McAlister asked the black man.

Beau Jackson shook his head. “If you aren't a fan of the old movies, then it can't mean anything to you. Just goes right over your head.”

For a long moment McAlister stared into the other man's watery chocolate-brown eyes. Then he said, “You're an original, Mr. Jackson.” He went down the last stretch of the hallway toward the door that the guard was holding open for him.

“Mr. McAlister,” the black man called after him.

He looked back.

“You're sure enough the only one I ever met here who is just exactly what he seems to be.”

McAlister couldn't think of anything to say. He nodded stupidly, embarrassed by the compliment, and he went outside into the rain and wind that lashed the capital.

SIX

Crossing the small reception lounge at two-twenty that afternoon, Andrew Rice told his secretary, “Officially, I'm not back yet. I don't want to talk to anyone. I don't want to see anyone. I'm not feeling very well.” And before she had a chance to tell him who had telephoned during the morning, he hurried past her desk and went into his private office and slammed the door behind him.

The office was a reflection of Rice himself: the furniture was large, bulky, heavy; the chairs were overstuffed; there was a slight but pervading sloppiness about the place. The wall shelves overflowed with books that had been jammed into them every which way. The desk was six feet by four feet, held three telephones, and was littered with dozens of letters and memoranda and government reports. Three rumpled easy chairs, all of them wide enough and deep enough to comfortably accommodate Rice himself — therefore, so large that they dwarfed many other men — were arranged in a semicircle around a water-stained oak-and-chrome coffee table.

Roy Dodson was sitting in the easy chair nearest the windows. Because he was six four and weighed two-twenty, the chair did not dwarf nun. He was holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a recent issue of a news magazine in the other. When Rice came in, Dodson leaned forward and put both the coffee and the magazine on the low oak table.

Rice said, “We have to move fast.”

Dodson got up.

Not bothering to take off his raincoat, scarf, or hat, Rice went around behind the desk and collapsed into a king-size, caster-equipped, posturematic chair. He pulled several paper tissues from a chrome dispenser on the desk; he wiped his face, which was greasy with perspiration. “McAlister's man is David Canning.”

“He's had a desk job for years.”

“Obviously, McAlister doesn't think the man's gone to seed, desk job or no desk job,” the fat man said. “Get out of here. Get to a public phone.” He picked up a pen, scribbled on the back of a used envelope, and handed the envelope to Dodson. “That's the number of a phone in the agency's main file room. It'll be answered by a Miss Rockwalt. She's one of ours. She'll find Canning's home address for you.”

“Then?”

“You take two men out to his house. Look it over. Find a way to hit him.”

“Make it look like an accident?”

“There's no time for that approach,” Rice said irritably. “He's leaving Washington on a four o'clock flight to Los Angeles.”

“Which airline? Which airport?” Dodson asked. “It might be a lot easier to hit him in an airport parking lot or restroom than in his own home.”

“Well, I don't know which airline or which goddamned airport,” the fat man said. “McAlister didn't say. If I'd insisted on knowing, I'd have had to explain why I was so damned curious.”

Dodson nodded. “One problem.”

“What's that?”

“The only other men I know in our group are Maxwood and Hillary. Maxwood's in Texas on an assignment. Hillary's here in the city, but I don't know where. How do I reach him? Who do I get for backup?”

The fat man thought for a moment. Hillary and an agent named Hobartson were on security duty at Wilson's laboratory. They could be spared for this. “I'll get to Hillary and his partner. They'll meet you downstairs in the lobby at a quarter of three— twenty minutes from now.” He shook his head. “I just don't see how you're going to have time to hit Canning before he leaves for the airport.”

“Maybe we won't have to set him up at home. If we can get there in time to follow him, we can still do the job at the airport.”

“Get moving.”

“Yes, sir.” Dodson took his coat from a hook on the back of the door, and he went out, closing the door behind him.

Rice's three telephones were three different colors: one black, one blue, and one white. The white phone was a private top-security line that did not pass through the building's switchboard. He lifted the white receiver and dialed the unlisted number of the laboratory.

The man on the other end did not identify himself or the place from which he was speaking. “Hello?”

“Hillary?”

“Yes.”

“This is the Spokesman.” That was the name Rice used with agents of The Committee, for nine out of ten of his men did not know who he was.

“Sir?”

“You and your partner leave that place and go to the first-floor main lobby of the Executive Office Building. At two forty-five you'll meet Dodson there. He has a job he'll explain to you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You haven't much time. Don't be late.”

“We're leaving now.”

Rice put down the receiver, opened a desk drawer, and put his right hand into a bag full of chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies. He ate one of them, licked his fingers, and flicked an intercom switch.

“Yes, Mr. Rice?”

“Miss Priestly, I need a list of all U.S. marshals assigned to the Washington area. Do we have a thing like that on file?”

“No, sir.”

“Then get hold of Fredericks over at the Justice Department. Ask him to have such a list hand-delivered to me within the half-hour. Tell him it's connected with a matter of national security.”

“Yes, sir.”

Finally, he took off his scarf and hat, stood up and wrestled loose of his coat. He didn't bother to hang up anything; he tossed the garments onto the nearest easy chair.

Now what?

He answered himself: Just wait. Just relax.

The pessimistic half of his mind told him: Impossible. It isn't just the Dragonfly project that's at stake. If this bastard McAlister breaks us on this one, he's going to destroy us altogether.

The optimistic Rice told the pessimistic Rice: He won't touch you. He can't touch you. You have all the advantages.

But I can lose everything I've built these last seventeen years…

Don't be a fool. You'll lose nothing. If he gets too close to you — or if anyone else gets too close to you— you can have him killed. You're more ruthless than any of them. That counts for something.

This brief, internal pep talk didn't help Rice at all. He still felt a deep pressure in his chest. He was still tense.

He sat down at his desk again, reached into the open drawer, picked up a second cookie and ate it in one bite. A few crumbs fell onto the front of his shirt. Before he had fully swallowed the second cookie, he popped a third one into his mouth. Then a fourth. A fifth and sixth… The very process of masticating, salivating, and swallowing affected him as a tranquilizer might have done. The combination of chocolate and marshmallow seemed to act like an emetic on the time stream of his mind, causing him to flush out the present and the future until only the past remained to tantalize him…

Perhaps the single most important hour of Rice's existence came at eleven o'clock at night, two days before Christmas, in the middle of his twenty-fourth year — although he was not at that time aware of the irresistible forces of change that were already working relentlessly within and upon his life.

At that time he was living in Boston, doing graduate work at Harvard, studying economics and political systems during the day and writing feverishly about politics and social theory at night. Once a month he took the train down to New York City, where he met J. Prescott Hennings, the young editor and publisher of two periodicals that were devoted to the dissemination of every facet of ultra-conservative American thought. Scott Hennings, at least in Rice's opinion, was proof that the American Dream could still come true. Hennings had inherited a twenty-million-dollar real estate fortune which he had built into a fifty-million-dollar empire by his thirtieth birthday. Now he let his businesses run themselves while he dedicated himself to the preservation of the capitalistic system in a world where Communists squirmed on all sides like worms in the walls of an old mansion. Each of his magazines had a circulation of just twenty thousand and a combined readership of a hundred thousand, and every issue lost money. Hennings hardly cared, for he could lose money every day for the remainder of his life, even if he died an octogenarian, and nonetheless leave a fortune behind him. Once a month Rice personally submitted an article to Hennings, with whom he had become close friends. Routinely, Hennings read it the same day, paid two or three hundred dollars for it, and published it forthwith.

None of Rice's Harvard acquaintances had ever read one of these articles or seen a copy of Hennings' magazines. That was of little consequence to Rice. He made rent money writing them — and he was reaching thousands of readers who were already enough in agreement with him to give his theories the careful consideration he could not have received in liberal circles. Indeed, at Harvard he was not well known. He merely used the university's library and other educational facilities much as a man might use a whore — or a whore use a man; he ignored the propaganda and took only the knowledge, and he tried not to be tainted by the extreme left-wing attitudes which lay, in his opinion, like an oppressive blanket of smog over the entire campus. Twice a year he was invited to a party at Hennings' penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, where he could socialize without having to mute or conceal his political views. At these affairs, which he treasured more than he did the money Hennings paid him, he met conservative congressmen, millionaire businessmen, generals and admirals, a few movie stars — and once even George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the National Socialist Party in the United States, had been there in a swastika-emblazoned uniform which, to Rice, was not at all anachronistic here in the 1960s. This was rare air for Rice. This was Mount Olympus, and he had somehow been allowed to mingle with the gods. Rice did not care, therefore, that the Harvard elite had never read or even heard of his monthly essays.

At eleven o'clock at night, two days before Christmas, in his twenty-fourth year, Rice completed a book-length manuscript, an inspired — if unbalanced and unfair — attack on Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Exhausted but unable to sleep, he stayed up all night rereading, correcting words and phrases, agonizing over sentence structure for more dark hours than he'd ever spent agonizing over the condition of his immortal soul.

The next morning he slept on the tram to New York. He delivered the script to Hennings, hoping it could be serialized in one of his magazines and that Hennings could place it with a publisher who specialized in conservative political theory. Although he hadn't known Rice was writing a book, Hennings promised to read it in a few days.

On Christmas Eve, 1964, Rice was alone in New York. He spent the evening in his hotel room, eating candy bars and pretending to watch television and trying not to think of his book. He had a nightmare in which Hennings rejected the book, called it a piece of unpublishable trash, and tried — with the help of four men in storm troopers' uniforms — to use the three hundred typewritten pages as a suppository which, though applied to Rice's anal canal, would cure him of his mental hemorrhoids. He woke up with loose bowels and ran for the bathroom.

Hennings didn't call Christmas Day, and Rice told himself this was to be expected. Scott had two children. He wouldn't give up his holiday to read the script. Yet Rice cursed him and ate more candy.

That evening the pressure became unbearable. He went walking in Tunes Square, where happy crowds lined up at theaters and street-corner Santas endured the final hours of their reincarnations. Oblivious of the cold wind and snow flurries, he kept his mind on that commodity which he had left his room to find: a professional piece of ass.

He found one: a pretty young brunette on Forty-second Street. He weighed only two-thirty in those days, and she wasn't much put off by him as some prostitutes eventually came to be. They set a price. He said he had no hotel room, but she knew a place where a key cost six dollars and there was no register to sign.

In the room he sat and watched her undress. She stripped without ceremony or style. Her breasts were large, belly flat, legs long and lovely. She was firm, unmarked. She seemed sweet and wholesome except for the plastic sheen of her eyes and the hard twist of her mouth.

When he began to take off his clothes, she stretched out on her back in the center of the bed, closed her eyes. Nude, he got onto the bed and straddled her chest as if he wanted her to use her mouth on him. She opened her eyes in time to see that he was about to strike her. She screamed — just as his fist chopped her chin, split her lip, broke a couple of her teeth, and knocked her unconscious. Breathing heavily, muttering, giggling, he pummeled her face, breasts, and stomach. He used his fists and open hands and finger-nails. His climax was spontaneous and intense. Then, whimpering, he washed the blood off his hands and chest. He dressed and left the room and walked out of the hotel into the wind and snow.

That night he slept well.

The telephone woke him at nine o'clock. It wasn't Hennings, as he expected it to be. The voice was cool, businesslike, and yet feminine. She identified herself as Evelyn Flessing, personal secretary to Mr. A.W. West of Southampton, Long Island. She said, “Mr. West would like very much to have you to dinner this evening — if you are free, of course.”

Although he had never met him, Rice didn't have to ask who A.W. West was. West's grandfather, Edward Wallace West, had been in the oil business in the early days of the Texas fields but was driven out of that racket by John D. Rockefeller's hired thugs. Salvaging only a few million dollars from his oil interests, Edward hired his own thugs, cops, judges and congressmen. Then he bought a railroad. He had learned ruthlessness from Rockefeller, and he proceeded to make tens of millions of dollars out of his many trains, resorting to violence when there was no legitimate way to destroy a competitor. Later, Edward's son, Lawrence Wallace West, moved the family money out of railroads and into aircraft design, production, and sales. During the Second World War he quadrupled the West fortune. When the Korean War began, Alfred Wallace West, grandson of Edward, was in charge of the wealth, and he expanded the West holdings in war-related industries. He also invested in Las Vegas hotels and casinos when he foresaw that the desert town would become the richest resort in the United States. Booming gambling revenues, munitions sales, and profits from a dozen other industries swelled the West fortune past the billion-dollar mark in 1962. And now the name A. W. West was synonymous with the kind of superwealth unknown before the twentieth century; it was as common and revered a name in banking circles as were Rockefeller, Getty, Hughes, Rothschild, and a handful of others.

Evelyn Flessing said, “Mr. Rice?”

He knew this was not a hoax. Hennings was the only one who knew where he was staying — and Hennings was utterly without humor. “Why would A.W. West want to have dinner with me?”

“You've written a book that interests him a great deal.”

“I see.”

“Then you'll join him for dinner?”

“Yes. Certainly. I would be delighted.”

“Mr. West's limousine will be at your hotel at five-thirty.”

After the woman hung up, Rice tried to call Hennings, but Scott was unavailable. He had left a message: “Have a pleasant dinner in Southampton.”

What in the hell was going on?

What did it mean?

Had Hennings read the book? Apparently.

Had he passed it on to West? Obviously.

Had a busy man like A.W. West taken the time to read the script, virtually overnight? So it seemed.

Why?

The next eight hours passed slowly. He paced around the room, switched on the television, switched it off, paced, switched the set on again… He ate two lunches in the hotel coffee shop, came back to his room, paced. He snacked on peanuts and would have devoured time if it had been edible.

At five-thirty, when the Phantom IV Rolls-Royce arrived, Rice was waiting for it. He identified himself to the chauffeur who came around the car to greet him, and he allowed the rear passenger door to be opened and closed for him. He was conscious of people looking at him as no one had ever looked at him before, and he felt giddy.

Behind the wheel once more, the chauffeur put down the electrically operated glass partition between the driver's and the passenger's compartments. He showed Rice the small bar — ice, glasses, mixers, four whiskies — that was hidden in the back of the front seat by a sliding chrome panel. To the left of the bar another panel concealed a small television. “If you wish to speak to me,” the chauffeur said, “push the silver intercom button. I can hear you, sir, only when the button is depressed.”

“Fine,” Rice said, numbed.

Leaving Manhattan, they crawled with the rush-hour traffic. Once on tie superhighway, however, they moved, doing nearly twice the posted speed limit. They passed four police cruisers, but were not stopped. At seven-thirty they entered the oak-framed drive that led up a gentle slope to the West mansion.

The house loomed like an ultra-expensive Swiss hotel or clinic. Warm yellow light spilled from fifty windows and painted the snow-skinned lawn. Inside, a doorman took Rice's coat, and a butler showed him to the study where A.W. West was waiting for him.

West looked like a billionaire. He didn't appear to be some sort of gangster, as Onassis did, and he didn't look like a high school principal, as David Rockefeller did; nor did he have that prim, asexual, acidic manner that made Getty seem like a Calvinist fire-and-brimstone preacher. West was tall, silver-haired, slim. He had dark eyes and a deep tan. His smile was broad and genuine. He was obviously a man who enjoyed life, enjoyed spending money every bit as much as he liked making it.

In the great man's company Rice felt awkward and insignificant. But before long they were chatting animatedly, as if they were old friends. At eight-thirty they went into the main dining room, where two maids and a butler served dinner. It was the best meal Rice had ever eaten, although; later he could not recall what most of the dishes had been. He remembered only the conversation: they discussed his book, and West praised it chapter by chapter; they discussed politics, and West agreed with him entirely. A.W. West's approval was to Rice what a voice from a burning bush might have been to a religious man. He no longer felt awkward and insignificant, and he did not overeat

After dinner they went to the library to have brandy and cigars. When he lit the cigars and poured brandy, West said, “You haven't asked why Scott sent me your book, why I read it, or why you're here.”

“I thought you'd get around to that in your own time.”

“And so I have.”

Rice, growing tense again, tasted his brandy and waited.

“It's often said that I'm one of the six or seven most powerful men in the country. Do you believe that?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Most people think I can buy and do whatever I want. But even a billionaire's power is finite — unless he's willing to risk everything.”

Rice said, “I don't understand what you're getting at.”

“I'll give you an example.” West put his cigar in an ashtray and folded his hands on his stomach. His feet were propped on a green-velvet-covered footstool. “In 1960 I was determined John Kennedy would never sit in the White House. He was soft on Communism, an admirer of Roosevelt's socialism, and a fool who refused to see Communists in the black equal-rights crusades.” West's face was red beneath his tan. “In order to stop Kennedy, I channeled three million dollars into various political organizations. I wasn't alone. Friends of mine did nearly as much. Kennedy won just the same. Then we had the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, missiles in Cuba, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, race riots… Anyway, it was clear that Kennedy was destroying this country. And it was also clear that even a man of my power and wealth couldn't keep the Irish bastard from serving a second term. So I had him killed.”

Rice couldn't believe what he had just heard. Gaping, he waited for West to smile, waited for him to say it was a joke.

West didn't smile. “I wasn't the only one involved. I can't take all the credit. Hennings was part of it. And two other men.”

Rice shook his head and repeated the litany which the American people had been taught by television, radio, and newspapers: “Lee Harvey Oswald was a psychotic, a loner, one man with one gun.”

“Oswald wasn't very stable,” West agreed. “But he wasn't even slightly psychotic. He was a sometimes CIA agent, a scapegoat. He never pulled the trigger.”

“But the Warren Commission—”

“Wanted to reassure the public, and quickly. Those men wanted to believe in Oswald. Investigators often prove what they want to prove. They're bunded by their own precepts.”

Andrew Rice quivered inside. He felt weak, faint, almost giddy. He wanted to believe West, for if one could assassinate a President and get away with it, the future of the United States was not, would never be again, in the hands of men who were in sympathy with the worldwide Communist movement. If men of great wealth, those who had the most to lose in a Communist takeover, were willing to assume this sort of indirect leadership of the country, leadership through assassination and whatever else was necessary, then democracy and capitalism were safe for an eternity! But it was too good to be true, too easy… He said, “It's difficult to believe so many people could be misled.”

“Americans are sheep,” West said. “They believe what they're told. They don't read. Most of them are interested only in sports, work, families, screwing each other's wives… In the vernacular—'They don't know from nothing.' And they don't want to know from nothing. They're happy with ignorance.” He saw that Rice wanted to believe but was having trouble accepting it. “Look, there are enough clues in the Warren Report to convince any reasonable man that Oswald was either part of a conspiracy or a scapegoat. Yet you never bothered to study the report and piece together the facts. If you accepted the commission's verdict, why shouldn't the average man accept it. You're a genius, or near it, and you never doubted.”

“What clues?” Rice asked.

Leaning forward in his chair so that they were in Something of a huddle over the footstools between them, West began to count them off: “One, the autopsy notes were burned. Do you think that's the usual procedure in a murder case?”

“I guess it isn't.”

West smiled. “Two. Oswald was given a paraffin test to see if his cheeks held nitrate deposits — which they would have had to hold if he'd recently fired a rifle. The test was negative. In any ordinary case, in any ordinary court, this would probably have cleared him of murder. Three. The first medical report from Parkland Hospital, later confirmed by autopsy, said the President was shot in the temple. The report still stands. Yet the commission decided that Oswald shot the President in the back of the neck. One bullet?”

Rice said nothing. He was sweating.

Caught up in his argument, smiling, West said, “Four. Julia Ann Mercer, resident of Dallas, observed Jack Ruby debark from a truck and climb that grassy knoll carrying what appeared to be a rifle wrapped in newspapers. Subsequent to the assassination, she tried to report Ruby to the FBI. We had men in the FBI, and she was ignored. The next day, as you know, Ruby murdered Oswald. Five. The Zapruder film shows that the fatal shot slammed the President backward and to his left. The laws of physics insist that the bullet came from in front and to the right of him. The grassy knoll. Yet we're told he was shot from behind. Six. A Dallas businessman named Warren Reynolds saw the man who shot Officer Tippit and chased him for approximately one block. He informed the FBI that the man who had shot Tippit was not Oswald. Two days later Reynolds was shot in the head by an unknown assailant. He survived. FBI men visited him in the hospital, and when he could talk again he had decided that it was Oswald who had shot Tippit. Domingo Benavides was only a few yards from Tippit when Tippit was shot. Benavides described the assailant as a man who did not even vaguely resemble Oswald. He was not asked to testify before the commission. Acquilla Clemons, another police witness, saw Tippit's killer and gave a description matching that supplied independently by Benavides. She was not called to testify before the commission. Mr. Frank Wright, whose wife called the ambulance for Tippit, was adamant that Oswald was not Tippit's killer. He was not called before the Warren Commission. A waitress, whose vantage point for the Tippit killing was not nearly so good as that of Benavides or the others, became the state's star witness. Even she could not identify Oswald, according to testimony in the commission report — yet in the summary the commission says she did positively identify Oswald.” He was still smiling. “Did you bother to read the report and locate this kind of material? There are hundreds of things like it.”

Rice licked his lips. His throat was dry. He was so excited he could barely speak. “No. I didn't look. I never looked.”

“And if you still doubt me,” West said smugly, “one more thing. Lee Harvey Oswald's Marine records, and testimony of friends he made in the Marines, show that he was an abysmal marksman barely able to pass his requirements. Yet the commission wants us to believe that he fired at a moving target, aiming through an opening in a tree's foliage, a situation that allowed him eight-tenths of a second to aim and fire. And he was using a mail-order rifle.” He laughed. “The commission asked three Master riflemen to re-create the assassination, just to show that it could be done as the commission said it had been done. The Masters used the Mannlicher-Cardano rifle Oswald had used, but only after the telescopic sight was remounted.”

Rice blinked. “Remounted?”

The sight wasn't aligned with the barrel and, therefore, whatever one saw through the telescope was not what the barrel was pointing at. We made a mistake planting the Mannlicher-Carcano. We should have made certain the gun at least could have been used for the job even if it wasn't. But it worked out well enough.”

“The Master riflemen,” Rice reminded him.

“Oh, yes. After the telescopic sight had been remounted, the three Masters tried their hands at a recreation. They were placed on a platform half as high as the sixth-floor window from which Lee Oswald supposedly fired the shot. Their target was not moving, while Oswald's target had been moving. They were allowed all the time they wanted to line up a shot— not eight-tenths of a second, as Oswald supposedly had. Their target was more than twice as large as the President's head had been. You know what? None of them could kill the target — or even come close to killing it.” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, picked up his cigar. “There was no need to make a perfect job of it. The files of evidence — which the public has been told again and again contain nothing that hasn't already been told — were sealed in the National Archives and will not be made public until the year 2039. This is for reasons of national security, we're told. And even then, even when they're told that worthless evidence must be kept secret for seventy-five years, the sheep suspect nothing.”

Rice finished his brandy in one swallow.

“Do you believe me now?” West asked.

“Yes.”

West let smoke out through his nostrils. “I have convinced my associates that we must not waste the contacts and the expertise that we developed while planning and executing the Kennedy assassination. We must organize, establish an underground apparatus — what I like to call The Committee. We must solidify our gains and protect them. And we must look for a new, profitable — operation. Operations. We must use The Committee as if it were a stock-investment plan.”

“Other assassinations?” Rice said weakly.

“If it comes to that, yes. But there are other tools. If we can gain even partial control of the FBI and CIA, we ought to be able to engineer events that will keep the Communist sympathizers out of office in the first place. We can use federal officers to harass them. We can put federal taps on their telephones. We can shadow them every minute of the day. If a candidate has a mistress — or some other dark secret — we'll find it and use it to make him drop out of the race even before the primary elections are over.”

“And where do I come in?”

Finishing his brandy, West said, “We need someone to run the day-to-day affairs of The Committee. Someone who is dedicated to this country, someone who hates, as we do, the Communist conspiracy. We need a man who is intelligent, as brilliant a man as we can find. He must be willing to take big risks. He must be ruthless. And he must be a man who has no public identity, because we want to build him an identity as one of the foremost liberal thinkers of his day.”

“Liberal?” Rice said, perplexed.

“Camouflage,” West said. “He'll be a double agent, so to speak.”

“But I've written this book—”

“As yet unpublished.”

“You mean — destroy it?”

“Do you mind?”

“I guess not. But the articles in Scott's magazines—”

“For all practical purposes, no one reads them. And certainly, no one remembers who wrote them. Scott will burn all unsold issues that contain your articles. Most people who subscribe to the magazines probably throw their copies away. And even if someone runs across one of the essays after you've been established as a liberal theorist, you can blush and say it was the work of a younger and less sensible Andy Rice. Easy.”

“May I have more brandy?”

“Help yourself.”

They were silent for a few minutes.

Then Rice said, “I'm interested.”

“I knew you would be.”

“But you risked so much! You told me all of this without being sure I'd want to get involved. You told me you set up Kennedy's assassination and—”

“No risk,” West said. “If you'd been appalled, if you hadn't wanted to be a part of The Committee, we'd have killed you.”

Rice shivered. “I see.”

West poured himself another brandy. “Well! Shall we get down to specifics?”

His heart hammering, Andrew Rice nodded, sipped his brandy, and listened to A.W. West reshape his life

.

“Mr. Rice?”

Startled, Rice bit his fingers as they were shoving a chocolate-covered marshmallow cookie into his mouth. He grunted with pain. He looked up, but there was no one else in his office.

“Mr. Rice?”

Miss Priestly.

The intercom.

He pushed the button. “What is it?”

“The list just arrived, sir.”

“List?”

“The list of federal marshals you asked me to get from the Justice Department, Mr. Rice.”

“Oh, yes. Bring it in, please.”

She brought it in, and after she had gone he picked up the white telephone and dialed Miss Rockwalt in the CIA file room out in Virginia. He said, “This is the Spokesman.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I've got a list of names for you. Pencil handy?”

“Go ahead.”

“They're all federal marshals assigned to the Washington area.” He read off eighty names. “I want an address for each man. I want to know if he lives alone or with someone. I want his age, physical description, everything that you can get. You can call me at the usual number. I'll be here until seven o'clock this evening.”

“It may take longer than that, sir,” Miss Rockwalt said.

“Then I'll wait here until you've called.”

“No later than nine.”

“Every minute counts, Miss Rockwalt.”

He hung up.

He ate another cookie.

He looked at his watch.

Was David Canning dead by now?

SEVEN

After McAlister had gone, David Canning spread drop-cloths around the schefflera, mixed up a quart of Malathion solution, protected his eyes with ski goggles, and sprayed the tree to prevent a recurrence of the mealybugs. One pint of solution remained, and he poured that into the potting soil to kill any insect eggs that might be there.

While the insecticide dripped slowly from the sharp tips of the schefflera leaves, Canning sat at the kitchen table and wrote a note to the cleaning woman who came in twice a week. If he had to be gone more than seven or eight days, she would have to know how to mist and water the plant. He didn't want to come home and find it yellowed, spotted, and wilted.

In a strange way he felt responsible for the tree. His was more than the sense of responsibility that a man should have for any living thing. This was specific. It was personal. Indeed, there was something almost paternal about it; Mike had observed as much when he had come to visit his father two weeks after Canning had moved into the apartment.

“You act as if it's a child,” Mike had said, amused.

“There's more to plants than most people realize. I swear that sometimes the damned tree seems— aware, conscious. In its own way.”

“You've been reading books. Talk to your plants. Play some classical music for them. That kind of thing.”

“I know it sounds crazy—”

“I'm not criticizing. I'm just surprised. I didn't know they taught you reverence for life in the CIA.”

“Please, Mike.”

“Sorry. I'll keep my opinions to myself.”

“I never had to accept the prevailing philosophy of the agency in order to work there.”

“Sure.”

“I mean it.'

“Sure. Okay. Can we talk about something else?”

The way Canning saw it, he had bought the tree and brought it here, and he was the one trying to make it flourish inside of four walls and under a roof where, it had never been meant to grow. He had a duty to make every effort to keep it in good health, in return for the beauty that it added to his world and the peace of mind it gave him. He had an unspoken covenant with the tree, and his promise was his self-respect.

Or was he kidding himself? Was his caring for the tree merely an attempt, unconsciously motivated, to atone in some small way for having been a failure as a husband and father? Was he trying to make up for having destroyed his marriage and for having ruined his own children? Was he desperately trying to convince himself that he was not a cold, burnt-out, emotionless son of a bitch?

Don't be so hard on yourself, he thought.

Was it your fault, he asked himself, that Irene became a frigid, nagging bitch? To make her want him again, he paid her every imaginable form of tribute: praise, respect, love, romance, patience, tenderness, gifts and gifts and more gifts. He was a good lover; his own satisfaction mattered less to him than did hers. But because they did not enjoy a natural and mutual lust, because he always had to finesse her into bed with carefully thought-out game plans, his love soon became cynical, his respect feigned, and his praise as hollow as the chambers of the heart.

But to pretend that sex was their only failure was not fair to Irene. They had drifted apart both in and out of the bedroom — and they had become strangers to their children, as, well. Yet, as his father had taught him, and as he had learned from the examples provided by his father's friends, he had given his family all of the important things: a good home in a fine neighborhood, a swimming pool in the backyard, a nice school for the kids, allowances for the kids and money for their clarinet lessons and ballet school and baseball camp, the security of a substantial bank account, new cars, membership in a country club, an expensive vacation every year… If he had provided all of this and yet the four of them were strangers who merely boarded under one roof, then he had not fully understood his father and had gone wrong somewhere, somehow.

But what was the answer? Could it be explained by the usual pop sociology and pop psychology? Had he provided all the material comforts and then failed to give them love? Had he not managed to communicate to Irene and the children the things he felt in his heart? Had he and Irene been trapped by conventional man-woman roles that stifled their relationship? Had he been a male chauvinist pig without wanting to be, without knowing that he was? Had he walked along the generation gap, his kids on one side and he on the other, without understanding that it was a vast canyon and not just a gully? Running missions for the agency, he had been away from home for one and two months at a tune, six months out of twelve. Mike and Terri were adults by the time he received the White House assignment. Should he have been with them more time than he had been when they were young, to serve as an example and as a source of authority? Should he have been home every night to comfort Irene, to share the triumphs and defeats and irritations of daily life? Had his prolonged absences — and perhaps even the sometimes ugly nature of his job — been the cause of the alienation within his family? And if that were true, then wasn't he responsible, after all, for the withering of Irene's desire?

He felt very much alone.

He was adrift. Moving aimlessly toward an unknown future. He had no one. No one. And nothing. Nothing at all.

Except Dragonfly.

He finished the note to the cleaning woman, left it in the center of the kitchen table, switched off the fluorescent lights, and went into the living room. He took up the dropcloths, folded them, and put them away. He called a taxi service and asked to have a cab waiting out front at three-fifteen. Then he went into the bedroom and packed two suitcases.

After he had changed out of his jeans into a pale-brown suit, yellow shut, brown tie, and leather shoulder holster, he took his gun out of the top drawer of his bureau. It was a nickel-finished Colt Government Model.45 Automatic with an eight-and-a-half-inch overall length and a five-inch barrel. Weighing only thirty-nine ounces, it was perfect for use with a shoulder holster. The sights were fixed, of square Partridge design, and glareproof. Slanted ramp-style, the forward sight caught the light and yet allowed for an easy draw. Canning's holster, which snapped open from sideways pressure and “sprung” the pistol into his hand, thus accommodating a barrel lengthened by a silencer, made the draw even easier. The Colt's magazine held seven standard.45 Auto cartridges, not the most powerful ammunition made, but sufficient. More men in the counterintelligence services of all nations had been killed with this handgun than with any other weapon. Canning had killed nine of them himself: two Russians, two Poles, two Chinese, and three East Germans.

He often wondered why he was able to kill with such complete professional detachment, but he had never found the answer. And in his darkest moments, he thought that a murderer who suffered no remorse should expect to raise a family as alienated as his own.

Struggling to avoid that sort of despair, he took the precision-machined silencer from the bureau drawer and screwed it onto the Colt's barrel. The silencer was five inches long and filled with a new, resilient wadding material that made it one hundred percent effective for at least thirty rounds.

He looked at his watch: three o'clock.

Time to get moving.

He pressed the pistol into his holster and distributed three spare magazines, all fully loaded, in his pockets. He reached for the gun, touched the stock, and smiled as the weapon popped into his right hand. He brought it out, flicked off the safety, studied it for a few seconds, and returned it to the holster.

Once again, he was a field op.

He felt considerably younger than he had when he'd gotten up this morning.

He turned out the lamp and carried his suitcases into the living room, where he suddenly remembered that he hadn't locked the kitchen door. His apartment had two entrances: one off the third-floor landing that was common to two other apartments, and a private entrance from the courtyard by way of a set of switchback stairs. He had used the private entrance this morning when he'd gone out for a quart of milk, before the rain had begun. He put the suitcases down and went to lock up.

Turning the knob on the kitchen door, intending to open it and latch the outer storm door, Canning saw two men enter the courtyard through the archway in the alley wall. The kitchen door was centered with four panes of glass; therefore, he could look through the stoop railing and straight down into the courtyard. He let go of the knob. He knew these men — not who they were but what they did. They were both tall, solidly built, dressed in dark suits and raincoats and matching rumpled rainhats. They paused inside the arch and looked around the courtyard to see if they were being observed.

Twisting the lock shut, Canning stepped quickly away from the door before they could look up and see him.

Lightning shredded the purple-black sky, and a frenetic luminescence pulsed throughout the dark kitchen. The ensuing thunder was like a shotgun blast in the face.

Canning hurried to the living-room windows and cautiously parted the heavy rust-colored velvet drapes that had come with the apartment. Sheets of rain washed the street, made the pavement glisten, boiled and foamed in the gutters, and drummed on the roofs of parked cars. Across the street a blue Ford LTD was at the curb, its parking lights glowing, the windshield wipers beating steadily. From this distance, veiled by the rain, the driver was only a black and nearly formless mass behind the wheel. He was looking out of his side window, looking directly at the apartment house: his face was a pale blur between his dark raincoat and his rainhat. Canning looked up and down the street, but he saw no one else.

By now the two men in the courtyard would have started up the steps toward the kitchen entrance.

He left the windows and went to the front door. He took the Colt.45 from its holster, carefully opened the door, and stepped onto the landing. It smelled faintly of the lemon-oil polish that the superintendent used on the oak banisters. Leaning against the railing, Canning looked down to the bottom of the stairwell and saw that it was deserted. He had expected that much, for they wouldn't want to make a hit in a public corridor if there was a chance they could take him in the privacy of his own apartment.

Listening to an inner clock that was ticking like the timer on a bomb, he went back into the living room, closed the door and locked it. He reached for the wall switch and turned out the overhead light—and now the entire apartment was cast in darkness.

He listened.

Nothing.

Yet.

He holstered the pistol and picked up the suitcases. He carried them into the bedroom and shoved them into a closet. Leaving the closet open, he walked back to the doorway and stood half in the bedroom and half in the living room. He drew the Colt once more and stood very still, listening.

Nothing.

He waited.

Something. Or was it? Yes, there it was again. A rasping sound. Not loud. Like a plastic credit card or some more sophisticated tool working between a door-jamb and a lock. It stopped. Silence. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Were they inside? No, too quiet. Twenty… And then more rasping, very soft and distant… They were good, but they weren't good enough. A fairly loud click! Silence again. Half a minute of dead air: just the rain hissing on the roof, hissing like background static when the radio dial moves off a channel. Then a creak. The kitchen door opening…

Canning went to the bedroom closet, stepped inside, and quietly slid the door shut in front of him. He held the Colt at his side, aimed at the door, gut level.

He didn't want to kill anyone, not even one of these fanatical bastards who called themselves Committee-men. He hoped they'd take one look through the apartment and decide he wasn't there. They hadn't come to get anything but him; therefore, if they thought he was gone, they would have no reason to search through drawers, cupboards, and closets. No reason. No reason whatsoever. If they knew enough to come after him, they also knew he was scheduled to leave Washington within the hour. They couldn't know which airport or airline he was using, for if they had known, they would have made the hit at the terminal or would have planted a bomb aboard his flight. Just as McAlister had said. So they must have come here out of desperation. Because they had tumbled to his identity so late in the game, this was their only chance to nail him. They would half expect him to be gone. When they found the rooms dark and deserted, they'd shrug and walk out and—

The closet door slid open.

Shit! Canning thought.

He fired two silenced shots.

The Committeeman grunted softly, one word, a name: “Damon!” He must have been calling his partner. But he spoke so softly that even Canning could barely hear him. Then he doubled over, clutching at his stomach, and began to fall into the closet.

Moving quickly, stealthily, Canning caught the dead man and eased him to the floor. He let go of the corpse, stepped over it, and went out into the bedroom.

The other agent wasn't there.

Canning listened and heard nothing.

He went into the living room and, when he saw that the front door was standing wide open just twenty-five feet away, faded into the shadows by the bookcases. He hesitated for a moment and was about to move toward the door — then held his breath as the second agent came back in from the landing. The man — Damon? — closed and locked the door.

“Freeze,” Canning said.

Because he already had his gun drawn, Damon evidently decided that he could regain the advantage. His decision was made with the rapid thought and fluid reaction that identified a first-rate agent. He turned and got off three silenced shots in a smooth ballet-style movement.

But he was shooting blind. The bullets were all high and wide of their mark. They ripped — with dull reports — into the spines of the hardbound books which lined the wall shelves.

Also at a disadvantage because of the extremely poor light, Canning fired twice, even as the other man was finishing his turn and getting off his third shot.

Damon cried out, fell to his right, and rolled clumsily behind the sofa. He was hit, probably high in the left arm or in that shoulder.

Canning went down on one knee. He heard Damon curse. Softly. But with pain. Then: deep breathing, a scuffling noise…

“I don't want to have to kill you,” Canning said.

Damon rose up and fired again.

It was close — but not nearly close enough.

Canning held the Colt out in front of him and moved silently through the shadows. He crouched behind an easy chair and braced the barrel of the pistol along the chair's padded arm. He watched the sofa.

Overhead, thunder cracked and the rain battered the roof with great fervor.

Ten seconds passed.

Ten more.

A minute.

Suddenly the agent scuttled out from behind the sofa and waddled toward the gray light that spilled in from the kitchen. At the doorway he was perfectly silhouetted.

Canning shot him.

Damon's right leg buckled under him, and he collapsed onto the kitchen floor, failing to choke back a scream.

Cautiously but swiftly, Canning got up from behind the easy chair and went after him.

Damon rolled onto his back and fired through the living-room doorway.

As he reached the kitchen Canning saw the gun coming up at him, and he threw himself to the left. When he heard the whoosh! of the silencer an instant later, he pitched himself back to the right and fired twice, at point-blank range, straight down into the man who lay before him.

When he finally let out his breath, Canning sounded like a bellows.

Lightning flashed again, revealing the bloodied body and the open, sightless eyes.

Canning took the magazine out of the Colt and replaced it with a fresh one. He slipped the pistol back into its holster.

“Dad, have you ever killed anyone?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Well, you work for the CIA.”

“Not everyone at the agency wears a cloak and carries a dagger, Mike. Most of us just sit at desks and page through foreign technical journals, looking for bits and pieces of data, clues that someone else can work into a puzzle.”

“You're not a desk man.”

“I'm not?”

“You aren't the type.”

“Well, it isn't easy to—”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Suppose I have.”

“Suppose.”

“And I'm not saying I have.”

“Just suppose.”

“Do you think it would have been in self-defense — or do you think your father's a hired assassin?”

“Oh, it would be in self-defense.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Technically.”

“Technically?”

“Well, Dad, if you'd chosen to work for someone besides the CIA, if you were a civilian, then foreign undercover agents wouldn't have any reason to kill you. Right? If you were a lawyer or a teacher, your job wouldn't require you to kill anyone in self-defense. So even if you did kill only in self-defense — well, you chose the job that made it necessary … So you must have enjoyed it.”

“You think I could enjoy killing a man?”

“That's what I'm asking.”

“Jesus!”

“I'm not saying it was a conscious enjoyment. It's more subtle than that.”

“I've never enjoyed it!”

“Then you admit to murder?”

“No such thing.”

“Wrong term, I guess. You admit to killing.”

“We agreed this was a purely theoretical discussion.”

“Sure.”

“Mike, you try to see everything as black and white. The agency isn't like that. Neither is life. There are shades of gray, shadows. I don't see any point discussing this with you. You don't seem mature enough to think about those grays and shadows.”

“Sure. You're right.”

“Don't be so damned smug. You only think you've won.”

“Gee, Dad, I didn't know this was a contest. I didn't know I could win or lose.”

“Sure.”

Canning stepped over the corpse, went to the kitchen door, and looked down at the courtyard. The two potted cherry trees shivered in the wind. So far as he could see, no other men were waiting out there.

He locked the door, reached for the light switch, thought better of that, got a flashlight from a drawer by the sink, and went to search the dead men. Being careful not to get blood on his clothes, Canning first attended to the agent who was sprawled on the kitchen floor. He found a wallet full of papers and credit cards in the name of Damon Hillary. There was also a thin plastic case which was full of business cards for Intermountain Incorporated. Intermountain was an agency front. He went into the bedroom and dragged the other man out of the closet. This one, he discovered, was named Louis Hobartson and was also an employee of Intermountain.

In the bathroom he washed the blood off his hands. He used a wad of tissues to wipe smears of blood from the wallets, flushed the tissues down the commode. He checked himself in the mirror to be certain that his suit hadn't been soiled.

He looked at his watch: three-fifteen.

In the bedroom again, he neatly laid back the covers on the bed, lifted the mattress, and slipped both wallets far back on top of the box springs. He dropped the mattress, pulled the bedclothes in place, and smoothed out the wrinkles. Now, if the Commiteemen retrieved their men before he had time to tell McAlister to come after them, Hillary and Hobartson would not disappear without a trace.

He took his suitcases out of the closet and carried them back into the living room.

He took his raincoat from the front closet and struggled into it on his way to the living-room windows. Parting the velvet drapes half an inch, he saw that the LTD was still parked across the street, the driver still looking this way. Canning glanced at his wrist-watch: three-eighteen. When he looked at the street again, a taxi was just angling in beside the curb downstairs. The cabbie gave three long signals with the horn.

Canning left the apartment, locked up, carried his bags downstairs. At the foyer door he hesitated, then opened it, pushed through, and hurried to the cab. Without getting out in the rain, the cabbie had thrown open the rear door. It was a high-roof, British-style taxi; therefore, Canning didn't have to lift his suitcases in ahead of him. He stepped in, cases in hand, and sat down, wondering if the man in the LTD would be crazy enough to try to shoot him right out here on the street.

Reaching over the front seat, the cabbie pulled the door shut for him. “The dispatcher said National Airport.”

“That's right. I have a four o'clock flight.”

“You cut it close.”

“Nice tip if we make it.”

“Oh, there's no chance we'll miss.”

As they pulled away from the curb, Canning saw the LTD fall in behind them.

That's all right, he thought. The bastard can't drive and shoot at the same time.

To make a successful hit in a public place like an air terminal, you had to have at least two men: one to do the shooting and one to either cause a distraction or drive the getaway car. This man in the LTD could do nothing but follow him, see which flight he boarded, and report back to the boss.

Canning realized, however, that The Committee would probably soon learn the Otley identity and his entire itinerary. Within an hour after they left Washington, agents in California — perhaps the same ones who had murdered the Berlinsons — would be outlining a plan to kill him when he changed planes in Los Angeles.

At four-ten the jet lifted off, and by four-twenty it was above the storm. From his window seat Canning watched the city, the countryside, and then the clouds fall away from him.

“Suppose you'd been a German during the Second World War, someone who had the opportunity to get close to Hitler with a gun. Would you have shot him?”

“Gee, Dad, I thought you didn't want to talk about this sort of thing any more.”

“Would you have shot Hitler?”

“This is stupid. Hitler was dead before I was born.”

“Would you have shot him?”

“Would you have shot Genghis Khan?”

“You have two possible answers, Mike. Say yes, and you'd be admitting that given the right conditions, you could kill a man. Say no, and you'd be implying that you have no duty to protect the lives of innocent people whom you might have saved.”

“I don't get your point.”

“Of course you do.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“The right thing would have been to kill Hitler and save the millions of people who died because of him. Yet, in shooting him, you'd still be a murderer. In other words, a moral act is often a compromise between the ideal and the practical.”

Mike said nothing.

“It seems to me that morality and expediency are two sides of the same coin, a very thick coin that more often than not lands with both faces showing.”

“Do you feel very moral when you kill?”

“We're not talking about me or—”

“Oh, this is still 'theoretical,' is it?”

“Mike—”

“Hitler was one of a kind, Dad. A man as dangerous and crazy as he was, a man who needs killing as badly as he needed it, comes along once in a century. You're trying to take a unique case like Hitler and generalize from it.”

“But he wasn't unique. The world's full of Hitlers— but few of them ever make it to the top.”

“Thanks to men like you, I suppose.”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you feel heroic when you kill one of your little Hitlers?”

“No.”

“I'll bet you do.”

“I'm… surprised. Shocked. I'm just beginning to see how much you … hate me.”

“I don't hate you, Dad. I just don't feel much of anything at all where you're concerned, not anything, not one way or the other.”

An hour into the flight, Canning gave his forged State Department credentials to a stewardess and requested that she pass them along to the pilot. “I'd like to speak with him when he has a few minutes to spare.”

Five minutes later the stewardess returned. “He'll see you now, Mr. Otley.”

Canning followed her up front to the serving galley. The galley — now that the flight attendants were dispensing before-dinner drinks from a bar cart in the aisle — was reasonably quiet.

The pilot was a tall, paunchy, balding man who said his name was Giffords. He returned Canning's papers, and they shook hands. “What can I do for you, Mr. Otley?”

“If I read the departures board correctly back at National, this flight goes all the way to Honolulu.”

“That's right,” Giffords said. “We let off a few passengers in L.A., take on a few others, and refuel.”

“How long is the layover?”

“One hour.”

“Are you booked solid for Honolulu?”

“We're usually overbooked. And there's a waiting list for the cancellations. We hardly ever have an empty seat on the Hawaiian run.”

“I'd like you to make an empty seat for me.”

“You want to bump someone?”

“If that's the only way, yes.”

“Why is this so urgent?”

“I'm sorry, Captain Giffords, but I can't say. This is highly classified State Department business.”

“That's not good enough.”

Canning thought for a moment. Then: “I'm carrying an extremely important message to a man in China. It can't be delivered by phone, mail, or telegram. It can't go in the scheduled weekly diplomatic pouch. I didn't use a government plane because it was easier to keep the mission a secret if I flew on civil airlines. Somehow the wrong people learned I was the messenger, and they want to stop me at any cost. An attempt was made on my life just before I left Washington. It failed only because they didn't have time to set it up properly. But if I change planes in L.A., as planned—”

“They will have had time to set it up there, and they'll nail you,” Giffords said.

“Exactly.”

“This is pretty wild stuff for me,” Giffords said.

“Believe me, I don't find it routine either.”

“Okay. You'll have a seat to Hawaii.”

“Two other things.”

Giffords grimaced. “I was afraid of that.”

“First of all, I have two suitcases in the baggage compartment. They're tagged for Los Angeles.”

“I'll instruct the baggage handlers to retag them and put them aboard again.”

“No. I want to get off for them and bring them back to the check-in counter myself.”

“Why?”

“I've got to try to mislead the men who're waiting for me. If they know I'm continuing on to Hawaii, they'll just set up something in Honolulu.”

Giffords nodded. “Okay. What's the other thing?”

“When we land, get in touch with the airport security office and tell them there's a damned good chance that the next Pan Am flight to Tokyo will have a bomb aboard.”

Giffords stiffened. “Are you serious?”

“That's the flight I'm supposed to take out of L.A.”

“And these people, whoever wants to stop you, would kill a planeload of innocent people? Just to get you?”

“Without hesitation.”

Watching Canning closely, Giffords frowned. He wiped one hand across his face. But he failed to wipe the frown away. “Let me see your papers again.”

Canning gave him the State Department documents.

After he had looked those over, Giffords said, “You have a passport, Mr. Otley?”

Canning gave him that.

Once he'd paged slowly through the passport, Giffords handed it back and said, “I'll do what you want.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“I hope you realize how far out my neck is stuck.”

“You won't get it chopped off,” Canning said. “I've been straight with you.”

“Good luck, Mr. Otley.”

“If I have to rely on luck, I'm dead.”

He was the last one off the plane. He took his time strolling the length of the debarkation corridor, and he found his suitcases waiting for him when he reached the baggage carrousel.

Picking up his two pieces of luggage, he turned and looked at the busy crowd ebbing and flowing through the terminal. He paid particularly close attention to everyone in the vicinity of the Pan Am facilities, but he couldn't spot the men who had to be watching him — which meant they were damned good.

He turned his back on the Pan Am check-in counter and walked across the terminal toward the main entrance. He walked slowly at first, hoping he could get at least halfway to the doors before he alarmed the Committeemen who were surely watching him. Gradually he picked up speed and covered the last half of the lobby at a brisk walk. He glanced back and saw two obviously distraught men hurrying through the crowd, well behind him. Smiling, he went through the main doors.

Outside, he got into the first taxi line.

“Where to?” the driver asked. He was a young, mustachioed man with a broad scar on his chin and a broad smile above it.

Canning opened his wallet, which was thickened by five thousand dollars in U.S. currency and Japanese yen. This was the operational fund that McAlister had included in the packet that contained the Otley identification. Canning handed the driver a fifty-dollar bill and said, “There's a hundred more for you if you'll help me.”

“I'm no killer.”

“You don't have to be.”

“Then you name it,” he said, folding the bill and thrusting it into his shirt pocket.

“Get moving first.”

The driver put the cab in gear and pulled away from the terminal.

Looking through the rear window, Canning saw the two agents hail the next taxi in line.

“We being followed?” the cabbie asked.

“Yes.”

“Cops?”

“Does it matter?”

“For one-fifty in cash? I guess it doesn't.” He smiled at Canning in the rear-view mirror. “Want me to lose them?”

“No. I want them to follow us. Just keep them from getting too close.”

“That cab behind us?”

“That's right.” Canning looked back at it again. “Give them all the breaks. It isn't easy to run a tail at night.”

“Got you.”

“But don't be too obvious.”

The cabbie said, “Trust me. Where we going?”

“Do you know the Quality Inn on West Century Boulevard?” Canning asked.

“It's a little over a mile from here.”

“That's the one.”

“Sure. I've taken people there.”

“First, I want you to drop me in front of the lobby.”

“And then?”

Crisply, succinctly, with his characteristic orderliness, Canning told him the rest of it.

“One of the oldest tricks in the book,” the cabbie said, showing his broad white teeth in the mirror.

“You sound like an expert.”

“I watch the old movies.”

Canning grinned. “Think it'll work?”

“Sure. What you got going for you here's the simplicity of it. These guys won't be looking for anything that uncomplicated.”

“No trouble on your end?”

“Easiest money I ever made,” the cabbie said.

The other taxi stayed between a hundred and a hundred-fifty yards behind them, nearly far enough back to blend in with the other sets of headlights. Canning had no trouble keeping it in sight because one of its headlamps was dimmer than the other and flickered continuously. Just as, he thought, something about the tail end of this car individualized it and helped the Committeemen to keep it in sight.

“Here we are,” the driver said.

“You remember everything?”

“What's to remember?”

Before the screech of the brakes had died away, while the car was still rocking back and forth on its springs, Canning opened the door and got out. He grabbed both suitcases, kicked the door shut, and started toward the lobby entrance. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the flickering headlight of the other cab, which was now rushing across the motel parking lot.

The super-cooled lobby air snapped whiplike against his sweat-slicked face and sent shivers through him. At the back of his mind, just for a fraction of a second, there was a vivid picture of the dead man lying in blood on his kitchen floor. But the dead man was not Damon Hillary: he was David Canning, himself. He was standing over his corpse, looking down at his own dead body. He had shot himself. One David Canning had killed the other David Canning.

What the hell did that mean?

Forcing himself to walk slowly, he went past the front desk and on across the lobby. He entered a carpeted side corridor and kept going. He moved faster now.

None of the desk clerks called after him. He might have checked in earlier and left his bags in the car until he had eaten dinner. Or perhaps his wife had registered during the afternoon, and he was joining her. Or joining his mistress. Or his girl friend. Whatever the case, because he was tall and handsome and well dressed, he aroused no suspicion.

At the end of the corridor, he climbed a set of stairs, the two suitcases banging against his legs. He stopped at the top to catch his breath, and he looked down to the bottom of the stairwell.

It was silent, empty.

The two agents were either at the front desk or searching frantically through other parts of the motel maze in the hope of finding out which room he had entered.

He had to move.

In the second-floor corridor, with closed and numbered doors on both sides, Canning turned left and went to the intersection at the end of that wing. He turned right into another carpeted hall, and it was also silent, deserted. At the next set of stairs, he went back down to the first level, although he was now in a different wing from the motel lobby. He crossed a small concrete foyer that contained a rattling ice machine and two humming, clinking, syncopated soda vendors. Pushing open the outer door, he went into the parking lot at the rear of the motel.

The taxi was waiting there, lights on, engine running, and back door open wide.

Canning threw his suitcases inside, climbed in, closed the door, and laid down on the back seat.

“Hot-diggity-damn! So far so good,” the driver said with sheer delight.

Massaging his strained, aching arms, Canning said “Back to the airport. Better move it.”

“Sure enough.”

After three or four minutes had passed, the cabbie said, “There's no one behind us.”

“You're sure?”

“Positive. I've been circling around through these back streets all alone. If anyone was following me, he'd be as obvious as a pimple on Raquel Welch's ass.”

Canning sat up. He straightened his suit coat and shirt collar, adjusted the knot in his tie, and shot his cuffs to what he considered the proper one-half inch beyond his coat sleeves. Then he took a hundred dollars from his wallet and gave it to the driver. “You do very good work.”

“I told you so. I watch the old movies.”

Smiling, Canning said, “Good thing I didn't get a cabdriver who was an opera buff.”

“He'd have told you to give yourself up and sing.”

Canning winced.

“Well, a pun is supposed to be bad.”

“It was.”

“If you're ever in town again and need to make a fast getaway,” the driver said, “don't forget me. Name's Harry Tollins.”

“I'll recommend you to all my friends, Harry.”

They got back to the airport in plenty of time for Canning to check in at the airline counter and pay for his ticket to Hawaii. There were even ten minutes for him to take a cup of coffee in the line's VIP lounge before he had to board the plane.

Forty-five minutes after the jet lifted off from Los Angeles International, a stewardess came back the aisle and stopped in front of Canning. “Mr. Otley?”

“Yes?”

She held out a folded sheet of beige stationery. “From Captain Giffords, sir.”

“Thank you.”

He watched her as she walked back up the aisle; she had long, slim, exceedingly lovely legs. Abruptly, his trousers became too tight in the crotch. He suddenly realized how long it had been since he'd made love to Irene — and how much longer than that since he'd had a fully satisfactory sex life. Forcing himself to look away from her, clearing his throat, he opened the note and read the neatly hand-lettered four-line message:

Suitcase bomb found in baggage

compartment of Pan Am's flight

to Tokyo.

Safely removed and defused.

He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

The next time the stewardess came by, he asked her for a Scotch on the rocks. He felt that he could risk at least one small celebration.

When McAlister came on the line from Washington, Canning identified himself and said, “Do you trust our home phone?”

“Not really,” McAlister said.

“Then you'd better give me a number where I can reach you, a nice safe phone they'd never think of tapping.”

McAlister thought for a moment, then gave Canning another Washington number.

“Will you go there and wait for my call?”

“Yes. But I'll need a while to get there,” McAlister said.

Although it was only midnight in Honolulu, it was five hours later than that in Washington. McAlister had probably been asleep when the telephone rang.

Canning said, “An hour?”

“Half that.”

“Fine.”

Canning hung up and leaned back against the headboard of the hotel bed. He closed his eyes and looked through the stack of file cards in his mind, checking to see if he had remembered everything that he must tell McAlister. Like a dark flood tide, sleep swept up at him. The printing on the imaginary file cards blurred, and the cards themselves began to dissolve into blackness…

He quickly opened his eyes, shook his head in an attempt to clear it, got up, went into the bathroom, and splashed cold water in his face. The eyes that looked back at him from the mirror were bloodshot and ringed with loose, dark skin.

Back in the bedroom, he stood at the window and watched the big searchlights at Honolulu Airport, which was less than a mile away. At twelve-thirty he returned to his bed, sat down, picked up the telephone, and placed a call to the number that McAlister had given him half an hour ago.

“David?” McAlister said.

“Yes. Where are you?”

“At my sister-in-law's house,” McAlister said. “I don't come here more than once a month. There's no reason for anyone to have a tap on her phone.”

“Were you followed?”

“I was, but I shook them.”

“You're certain of that?”

“Absolutely. Where are you?”

“Honolulu.”

“That's not on the schedule.”

“You're telling me?”

“What's happened?”

“My cover's blown.”

“It can't be!”

Canning explained about the two agents who had come to kill him back in Washington. “You'd better send some men around to take care of the corpses. And if The Committee has already moved them, don't worry. I stripped the bodies of all identification and put everything between the mattress and box springs on my bed. You'll have some nice leads to work on.”

“Excellent. I'll have a detail at your place within an hour.”

“My cleaning lady comes tomorrow, Friday. She's very neat — and observant. You'll have to see there isn't a trace of blood left behind. Locate every bullet and patch up the holes they made. I used six shots. Four of them are in the dead men. The other two should be in the wall near the front door. The man in the kitchen fired five times. All of the slugs should be in the living room, and I know that three of them are lodged in the bookshelves.”

“But how could they tumble you so soon?”

“Maybe you were followed to my apartment.”

“I made sure I wasn't.”

“You're playing with professionals.”

“Look, I found a miniature transmitter attached to the bumper of my Mercedes. I got rid of it before I started for your place. I saw no one following me. I parked four blocks away and walked to your building — and I'm damned sure no one tailed me on foot!”

Canning was impressed with McAlister's thoroughness. “Who else knew about me?”

“The President.”

“That's all?”

“Andrew Rice was in the Oval Office when I told the President,” McAlister said. “Do you think either one of them would spread the word?”

“You know both of them better than I do.”

McAlister was silent a moment. Then he sighed and said “One of them might have told a second-level aide.”

“And the aide might have told his assistant.”

“And the assistant might have told his secretary.”

“And somewhere along the line it got to someone who's bent.”

“Christ!” McAlister said.

“Spilled milk.”

“How does all of this put you in Hawaii?”

Canning outlined the games that he and the taxi driver had played in Los Angeles.

“Then they still think you're in one of the rooms in this Holiday Inn?” McAlister asked.

“Quality Inn. I suppose that's just what they think.”

“How many rooms does this motel have?”

“Maybe — three hundred.”

“Too many for them to go knocking on doors.”

“Exactly.”

“So… They'll put the motel under surveillance and wait for you to come out.” The director laughed softly.

Canning said, “Don't underestimate them. They won't wait there forever. Before long they're going to find I conned them.”

“But they won't know you're in Honolulu.”

“No. But they'll pick me up again when I get to Tokyo. There's no question about that. They have to know about my Otley identity by this time.”

“You're right, of course,” McAlister said resignedly. His pipe-stem rattled against his teeth. Then: “When are you leaving Honolulu?”

Picking up the airline-ticket folder that was lying on the nightstand, next to the telephone, Canning said, “There's a flight to Tokyo leaving here at noon, just about eleven hours from now.”

“And when they get on your tail in Tokyo?”

“That's not your worry,” Canning said. “It's mine. And I can handle them. But there are three things you're going to have to handle yourself.”

“Name them.”

“You've got to get hold of my backup man, the interpreter who's waiting for me in Tokyo. Tell him how things have changed and give him my new estimated time of arrival.”

“No problem.”

“Tell him that he and I are going to have to double up in his room, since any room rented to Otley or Canning is bound to be hit by a Committeeman during the night.”

After a brief hesitation, McAlister said, “You're right.”

“Number two. We're scheduled to go to Peking aboard that French corporate jet. Will it wait an extra day, now that I'm one day behind schedule?”

“The French are extremely cooperative, especially this company,” McAlister said. “I don't foresee any trouble there.”

“Make sure they give the plane a thorough search. There might be a bomb aboard it.”

“They'll search it. But that probably won't be necessary. I didn't mention the French connection to the President. If there's been a leak to The Committee from someone on the White House staff, it can't have included anything about the French jet.” His teeth rattled on his pipestem again. “You said there were three things you wanted me to do.”

“Number three: I've got to know who my backup man is. Now that The Committee knows I'm your man, I've got to be sure they don't bring in an imposter when I get to Tokyo.”

“The interpreter's name is Tanaka,” McAlister said.

“Any identifying marks?”

“Scar toward the left corner of the upper lip. I believe I heard that it was caused by a sliver of broken glass. Perhaps a cut in a bottle fight.”

“Anything besides the scar?”

“Mole on the left cheek. Long, thick black hair. Kind of a high-pitched voice, soft-spoken. But don't let that fool you. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, Tanaka's stronger than you would think.”

“From the tone of your voice, I gather that you still think Tanaka's going to surprise me.”

“Oh, yes.”

'"How?”

“David, I've told you all that I'm going to tell you. You know enough about Tanaka to keep from falling for some Committeeman trying to pass himself off as your contact. But you don't yet know so much that you'd be a danger to Tanaka if they got their hands on you. Let's keep it that way, okay? Let's keep it on that need-to-know basis.”

Reluctantly, Canning said, “All right.”

“Good.”

“Do you think Tanaka's cover has been blown as thoroughly as mine?” Canning asked.

“Until I told you the name a minute ago, I was the only man who knew Tanaka was involved.”

“You didn't tell the President?”

“He didn't ask.”

Canning smiled and shook his head. The brief glow of anger he had felt toward the director faded away. “The next worst moment is going to be at the airport in Tokyo. They're bound to be watching for me.”

“Do you want me to have the Tokyo police—”

“The last thing we need is a shoot-out,” Canning said. “I'll take care of myself at the airport. But once I get out of there, how do I make contact with Tanaka?”

“Go to the Imperial Hotel and check into the room that's been reserved for you in Otley's name. Tanaka will call you there. Don't worry. Even if the other side knows you're staying at the Imperial, they aren't going to try to hit you in the first few minutes after you arrive. They saw what panic bought them when they tried to get to you in Washington. This time they'll be careful, slow, thorough. By the time they're ready to come after you, you'll be hidden away with Tanaka.”

Canning thought about it for a moment, stood up, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “You're probably right.”

“You'll be in Peking late Saturday.”

And the job wrapped up by Monday morning at the latest, Canning thought hopefully.

“Anything more?” McAlister asked.

“No. That's all.”

“Cable me from Peking.”

“I will. Upon arrival.”

“Goodnight, David.”

“Goodnight.”

Ten minutes later, having been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, Canning was in bed, curled fetally, fast asleep.

EIGHT

“This is the house.”

“Number checks.”

Lights were on downstairs.

The driver pulled to the curb, parked behind a yellow Corvette, and switched off the engine. “How do we operate?”

“As if we're on a case.”

“Seems best,” said the man in the back seat.

“Neighbors are close here. Can't be much noise.”

“There won't be if we use our credentials to get inside,” said the man in the back seat.

The driver doused the lights. “Let's go.”

At seven-thirty Wednesday evening, Washington time — when David Canning was still high over the Midwest in an airliner on his way to Los Angeles— three men got out of a Ford LTD on a quiet residential street in Capitol Heights, just outside the Washington city limits. In the new autumn darkness, with a fight rain drizzling down their raincoats, they went up the walk to the front door of a small, tidy two-story Colonial saltbox-type house. The tallest of the three rang the bell.

In the house a stereo set was playing theme music from a current hit motion picture.

Half a minute passed.

The tall man rang the bell again.

“It's chilly out here,” said the man who wore eyeglasses. “I'm sure as hell going to catch pneumonia.”

“We'll visit you in the hospital,” said the tall one.

“And when I get chilly,” said the man in the eyeglasses, “I always have to go to the bathroom.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said the smallest of the three. He had a thin, nasty voice.

“Well, that's not unusual, is it? Cold air makes lots of people want to go take a piss.”

“You're a real hypochondriac. You know that? First it's pneumonia. Then it's bladder problems,” said the smallest man.

The tall man said, “Will you two cool it?”

A moment later the porch light came on, blinding them for a second or two, and the door opened.

A tall, beefy, rather good-looking man in his late thirties scrutinized them through the storm-door screen. He had a broad, reddish face with a granite-block chin, sharp mouth, Roman nose, and quick dark eyes under bushy eyebrows. He kept his eyes as narrow as paper cuts while he studied the three of them. “What is it?”

“Are you Carl Altmüller?”

“Yes. Who're you?”

“CIA,” the tall man said.

“What do you want here?” Altmüller asked, surprised.

The tall man held his agency credentials up to the screen where Altmüller could see them. “We'd like ten minutes of your time to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“A case we're on.”

“What case?”

The tall man sighed. “Could we come in and discuss it, please? It's damned chilly out here.”

“Amen,” said the agent who wore eyeglasses.

Unlocking the storm door and pushing it open for them, Altmüller said, “I don't know any damned thing that could possibly interest the CIA. Now that's a fact.”

Stepping inside and following Altmüller down a narrow pine-floored entrance hall, the tall man said, “Well, sir, quite often people know things of which they aren't aware. It's quite likely that something you might find inconsequential, something you saw and which meant nothing to you at the time, will be the exact clue that we've been searching for all along.”

In the comfortably furnished living room, an attractive blonde was sitting on one end of the couch. She was wearing a tight blue sweater and a short white skirt; her legs were long and well tanned. She took a sip from an icy drink and smiled at them.

“This is my fiancée,” Altmüller said. “Connie Eaton.”

“Good evening, Miss Eaton,” the tall man said. “I'm sorry to interrupt.”

She glanced at Altmüller and then back at the agent. “Oh, that's all right, Mr.—”

“Buell,” the tall man said. “Ken Buell.”

“Now what's this about?” Altmüller asked, offering them neither chairs nor drinks.

Smiling at the woman, Buell said, “Would you mind going out to the kitchen for a few minutes?”

“Not at all.” She stood up and quickly pressed her skirt with her one free hand.

Turning to the agent beside him, Buell said, “Keep Miss Eaton company for a few minutes.” When Altmüller started to speak, Buell turned to him and said, “What I've come here to see you about is a top-secret matter. Miss Eaton must not listen in on us. And you must not discuss this with her when we've gone.”

Altmüller frowned and said, “I don't understand this.”

The woman squeezed his arm and said, “It'll be all right, Carl.” She smiled at the agent who wore eyeglasses and said, “The kitchen is this way, Mr.—”

He did not pick up on the cue as Buell had done. Instead, he said, “God, it's nice to be in a warm house! The heater isn't working in our car, and I feel like an ice cube.” He followed her across the dining room and into the kitchen. He closed the kitchen door behind them.

“Would you just have a seat on the couch, Mr. Altmüller?” Buell asked.

As Altmüller perched on the edge of the couch, the third agent put down the attaché case which he had been carrying and opened it on the coffee table. He took from it a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a cotton pad, a small vial of yellowish serum, and a hypodermic syringe wrapped in a sterilized plastic envelope.

Altmüller's eyes widened. “What's this?”

With that reassuring manner common to the best and worst medical doctors, Buell said, “Mr. Altmüller, you really have nothing at all to worry about. I'm certain you can understand that in a matter like this, with the national security hanging by a thread, extraordinary measures are required.”

“What are you talking about? What the fuck are you talking about? What could I have to do with the national security?”

“In time, Mr. Altmüller. I'll explain in time.”

Altmüller stood up. “Explain now.”

“In a situation like this, when the future of our country is in doubt, we can take no chances,” Buell said. “We must—”

“You're talking nonsense,” Altmüller said. “I'm not a spy. I'm a nobody. There's nothing I know that—”

“With so much at stake,” Buell said, raising his voice slightly, “we must be absolutely sure that you're telling the truth.”

“What is that stuff?” Altmüller asked, nodding at the vial. “Is it hyoscine? Amytal? Pentothal?”

“Oh, no,” Buell said. “In the agency we are able to take advantage of all the newest discoveries, the latest drugs. This is much more effective than Pentothal.”

The third agent broke open the plastic envelope and took out the syringe. He soaked the cotton pad in alcohol and wiped off the membrane that capped the vial. He popped the needle through the membrane and drew yellow fluid into the syringe.

“You need a warrant,” Altmüller said belatedly.

“Relax,” Buell said.

“The CIA doesn't even have domestic jurisdiction.”

“Relax.”

His hairline suddenly beaded with perspiration, Altmüller took a step toward the agent who held the needle.

“Sit down,” Buell said quietly, coldly.

Numbed by confusion and weakened by fear, Alt-müller stared at the silenced pistol that had appeared almost magically in Buell's right hand.

“Sit down.”

“No.”

“Don't forget your fiancée in the kitchen.”

Altmüller glared at him.

“We only want to ask you some questions.”

Opening his mouth and then closing it without speaking, Altmüller sat down.

“Roll up your sleeve,” Buell said.

Altmüller made no move to obey.

Raising the pistol, Buell put a bullet in the back of the couch, two inches from the big man's shoulder.

Shaken, Altmüller rolled up his sleeve.

The other agent took a length of rubber tubing from the attaché case and tied it tightly around Altmüller's biceps. In seconds the dark vein bulged out of the smooth skin just above the crook of the arm. The agent picked up the syringe, punched the needle through the vein, pulled it back slightly, drew blood into the syringe where the yellow fluid turned orange, then shot the drug into Altmüller's body.

As the smaller agent began to put away the medical equipment, Altmüller looked at Buell and said, “Ask your questions and get the hell out of here.”

“The drug won't take effect for another minute or so,” Buell said, still covering the big man with the pistol.

A minute later Altmüller's eyelids drooped. His mouth sagged partway open. He leaned back against the couch and let his hands fall, palms up, at his sides. His voice was weak, distant: “Oh… Jesus… Christ!”

Buell put away his pistol and took a sheet of paper from his wallet. It was a list of forty names. He took a felt-tip pen from his shirt pocket, uncapped it, and held it next to the first name on the list. Standing over Altmüller, he said, “Do you know a federal marshal named Frank Jaekal?”

Glassy-eyed, Altmüller did not respond.

Buell asked the same question again, in a firmer, louder voice this time.

“No,” Altmüller said weakly.

“Do you know a federal marshal named Alan Coffey?”

“No.”

“Do you know a federal marshal named Michael Morgan?”

“Yes.”

Buell drew a line through that name.

On the couch Altmüller began to twitch uncontrollably.

“Better hurry along,” the other agent told Buell.

Buell read out the remaining thirty-seven names, one at a time, until he had finished the list. Fourteen of the forty names were familiar to Altmüller. Calling the names at random, Buell went through the list a second time in order to double-check it, and he found Altmüller's responses did not change.

“It's really hitting him now,” the smaller agent said.

Altmüller had fallen on his side on the couch. His eyes were wide and sightless. Clear fluid bubbled at his nostrils. He mumbled and murmured and chewed at his tongue. His body snapped and twisted like a flag in the wind.

“It's a damned good drug,” the smaller agent said, “except for the side effects.”

Altmüller fell off the couch and thrashed violently on the floor. His tongue was bleeding, and his chin was painted red.

“Will these convulsions kill him?” Buell asked. He watched the big man roll and twist; he was intensely interested.

“No,” the smaller agent said. “Unless he was under a doctor's care, he might injure himself severely. But the drug isn't deadly.”

“I see.”

“But that's academic, of course.”

“Yes, of course,” Buell said. He drew his pistol and shot Altmüller twice. He put the gun away.

“Lets wrap him in that rag rug,” the other agent said.

When they had the corpse rolled into a neat cocoon, they carried it out to the kitchen.

Connie Eaton was sitting on a straight-backed chair, a strip of cloth adhesive tape over her mouth. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. She didn't struggle when she realized what was in the rug. She didn't try to scream, and she didn't faint. Instead, all the life drained out of her pretty eyes; she stared ahead as if she were mesmerized, catatonic.

The agent who wore eyeglasses said, “No need to carry him down to the basement. I found a better place to put him.” He led them across the room to a food freezer that stood in an alcove beside the back door. The freezer was practically empty. “Good?”

“Perfect,” Buell said.

They dumped Altmüller's body into the frosted bin and were just closing the freezer when the telephone rang.

“Probably for us,” Buell said. He went to the wall phone by the refrigerator, picked up the receiver, and “Hello?”

“Buell?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is the Spokesman.”

“Yes, sir.” He explained how things had gone with Altmüller.

The Spokesman said, “Too bad about the woman.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But why haven't you disposed of her too?”

“She must have a family.”

“She does,” the Spokesman said.

“And if she disappears for a few days, they'll have the police looking for her. They're bound to come to Altmüller.”

“Yes. You're right. What will you do? Take her somewhere and make it look like an accident?”

“That would be best,” Buell said. “Does she live alone?”

“According to my information, she does. I see what you have in mind. You can take her back to her apartment and make it look like the work of a burglar.”

“Yes, sir. Do you know her address?”

The Spokesman gave it to him. “But I have another job for you, first. There's a federal marshal named William Peyser. Lives near Maryland Park. Not far from where you are now.” He gave Buell the exact address. “Get to Peyser as soon as you possibly can and run him through the Altmüller program.”

“Will Peyser be alone?”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes. He has no children. His wife died four months ago, so he shouldn't have a girl friend.”

Buell stroked his chin with his long, pale fingers. He had a musician's hands, and he was fairly good on the piano. “Then I can leave one man here with the woman. Two of us can deal with Peyser.”

“When you've had time to wrap things up in Maryland Park, I'll give you a call there. I want to know which names on that list were strangers to both Altmüller and Peyser.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'll have additional instructions for you when you're finished at Mr. Peyser's place.”

“Fine.”

“Wait there for my call.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Spokesman hung up.

Putting the receiver back on the hook, Buell turned and looked at the woman.

She stared through him.

To the agent who wore eyeglasses, Buell said, “Jerry, you stay here with Miss Eaton. Jim and I have another job to take care of. It's just over in Maryland Park, We shouldn't be gone very long. When we get back we'll deal with her.”

Jerry took off his raincoat and tossed it onto the kitchen counter. “She's so pretty. I wish she hadn't been here.”

The smallest man said, “How do we deal with her?”

“The boss says to take her back to her apartment and make it look like some burglarkilled her.” Buell watched her eyes and saw no spark of fear.

“Sounds reasonable,” Jerry said.

Buell smiled. He had a sharp, saturnine face as pale as dusting powder. “I have a better idea.”

“What's that?”

“We take her back to her apartment, just like the boss says. But we don't make it look like the work of a burglar.” Buell paused to see if she was listening. She gave him no sign. “We make it look like the work of a rapist.”

Emotion, like dark fish in a gelid sea, flickered deep in the woman's eyes.

Buell knew that look, that well-concealed but still-visible terror. He had seen it in the eyes of countless women — and men — when he'd been a rifleman in Vietnam years and years ago.

“Good idea,” Jerry said, grinning.

The smallest man agreed.

NINE

On the morning of his twenty-first birthday, Chai Po-han soared up through the familiar nightmare. In his dream he lay upon a padded table in a room with an extremely low ceiling. Every aspect of the room was white: chalky white, star-white, so fiercely white that the eye rebelled at the sight. The eye — affronted by this unnatural, unbroken, flat and glaring whiteness — attempted to peer through the ceiling, walls and floor as if, after all, they were merely constructed of veined alabaster. But the eye could not deceive itself. And what sort of place was so inhumanly white and sterile? Instantly he knew that he had died and that now he was stretched out upon a table in some celestial morgue, beyond the veil of life. Soon the gods would come to dissect his soul and judge its worthiness. His Communistic soul. His atheistic soul. Why in the name of all his ancestors had his people — and he himself — embraced Maoism? Opiate of the masses: what folly! There were gods, ultimate beings who urinated on the soul of the dead Chairman. And when the dissection was completed, when the gods saw the worm of atheism curled within his heart, Chai Po-han would suffer eternal torture. Pages from the Quotations of Chairman Mao would be ground up and mixed with dung, and he would be forced to dine on this mixture for the rest of tune. To sharpen his humiliation, he would find the dung always tasted better than the other half of his menu. Or perhaps he would be reincarnated first as a slug, then as a cockroach, then as a snake… And now, in the ethereal silence, the gods came: men in green gowns, green surgical masks, and green caps, men like linen dragons. They circled him. He saw one of them raise a scalpel. White light winked along the cutting edge. In a moment the dissection would begin. His dead flesh would part bloodlessly, and his stilled heart would open to reveal the worm of faithlessness. Then: one form of damnation or the other, no question about it. And the scalpel rose, descended, touched his translucent skin and grew through it like a thorn through a rose petal…

Chai Po-han sat up on his meager straw mattress, a scream caught like bloody phlegm in the back of his throat. Then he heard the soft, furtive rustling of sleeping men turning on their straw beds on all sides of him, and he realized where he was: the agricultural commune in the cursed Province of Kweichow, well north of the minor city of Ssunan. He swallowed the scream and felt it slide thickly down his throat.

Lying back, closing his eyes, he tried to recover his breath and slow his heartbeat.

The night wind rattled the glass in the warped window frames of the long stablelike building.

Why, he asked the darkness, was he plaqued with this hideous, repeating nightmare?

The wind abruptly gentled down, and the window glass stopped rattling — as if the darkness were saying that it did not want to talk with him.

Was the cause of his bad dream to be found in his visit to the United States? The dream had begun immediately after that, around the middle of February, and it had been replayed nearly every night since then. In that land of unproscribed churches and cathedrals and synagogues and temples, had he begun to doubt the Maoist creed of godlessness which had freed China and made it great? No. Most certainly not. Surely a lifetime of atheism could not be cast off after one brief encounter with those who were religious. Such faith was not a bacterium that could infect a man once he had but taken a few breaths of tainted air.

But how else was he to explain this dream which he threw out each morning and which returned like a boomerang each night?

He got up and dressed in the coarsely woven gray pajama-suit which had been folded at the head of his bed, on top of the thatched box that contained his personal belongings. Although there was little light in the communal sleeping quarters, Chai made his way into the central aisle without stepping on anyone, and he walked to the far end of the building where there were several windows flanking the main entrance.

The glass was discolored and flecked with imperfections, but it was clean; and he was able to look down through the foothills to the River Wu which shimmered in the waning moonlight. A thin, pale yellow line edged the horizon: dawn was not far off.

How would he celebrate this anniversary of his birth? he wondered. Working in the terraced rice paddies? Or perhaps he would be assigned to the construction crew that was erecting — laboriously and solely by manual labor — new dormitories, barns, machinery sheds, and grain storage silos.

What a stifling place this is! What a hole!

Just months ago, during his visit to the West, he had spoken to American and French journalists who had been to China and who praised the communes. They had all seen Liu Ling Commune in Shensi and were impressed. Chai was proud of his people and had talked about Liu Ling as if he had been there. He had explained about the Chairman's enormous program which moved millions of young people to the countryside every year in order to keep them from becoming bourgeois, in order to have them “revolutionized” by the peasants, in order to have them completely “reeducated” as they could be only by sharing the simple life of the countryside. He had been so eloquent. At the time, however, he had not known that Liu Ling was a showplace, an atypical unit of the system, highly polished for the benefit of foreign newsmen and diplomats. Now, a veteran of the Ssunan Commune, Chai understood that those foreign journalists had been deceived, that he had been deceived, that most of the communes were slave labor camps where the inmates remained for the most part voluntarily because they had been made to believe that they were not slaves but heroes who were shaping the future of China.

He wanted out of here. Badly. But to leave on his own, to go where the government had not sent him, would be disastrous. He would not be arrested, of course. He would not be beaten or publicly shamed. Rather, he would be ostracized by every Party coordinator in every town and district throughout China. He would be able to get no work at all and little if any subsidization. Then he would know real poverty, and he would beg to be given a place on a commune, any commune at all — even this hole north of Ssunan.

He shuddered.

He had not been born to this.

Chai Po-han was the eldest son of Chai Chen-tse, who was one of the most powerful men in the country. The elder Chai was director of the Central Office of Publications, which had total control over every form of print and broadcast media within the People's Republic of China. Chai Chen-tse was respected — and feared.

In his father's shadow Chai Po-han had moved through the highest strata of Chinese society. He had studied media theory and language in Peking and had been greatly honored when he was chosen as the student representative to the group of publishers that was sent to tour the United States during the first half of February, and then France during the latter half of the same month.

He could never have foreseen that the trip to the United States would be his downfall.

The trouble had begun just three days before his group had been scheduled to leave Washington for Paris. During dinner that evening Chai had become drowsy and slightly sick to his stomach. Soon after the dessert and coffee had been served, he asked to be excused from the table, and he returned to his hotel room. The tour had been full of conferences, lectures, expeditions to publishing houses and printing plants and television stations, receptions… His exhaustion was not remarkable — although he thought it was somewhat odd how suddenly and forcefully it had caught up with him. No sooner had he undressed and passed water and climbed into bed than he was fast asleep.

He had learned the next part of the story secondhand:

An hour later his roommate, Chou P'eng-fei, had been stricken by the same exhaustion and had returned to their room. According to Chou (liar of liars), Chai had not been in the room at that time. Surprised but not alarmed, Chou had gone to sleep. When he woke the following morning, Chou saw that Chai had returned and was asleep in the other bed. And then Chou realized that his roommate stank of whiskey. He thought of ignoring it, thought of helping to conceal Chai's reactionary behavior. But Chou (liar of liars) said that he quickly realized his duty was to Maoism and Chinese honor rather than to his friend. Shocked, Chou had gone immediately to see Liu Hsiang-kuo, who was the security chief for the tour group. Chou and Liu returned to the hotel room and woke Chai with some difficulty.

And the rest of it he remembered all too clearly:

He had been in an incredible state. He had slept in his clothes, which were soaked with perspiration. He reeked of whiskey. And worst of all, preposterous as it seemed, impossible as it seemed, he was sleeping with a pair of lacy women's panties, very Western panties, clutched in his hands.

He insisted that he had slept the night through, that he had not been out of the room, that he knew nothing of the whiskey or the panties.

Liu Hsiang-kuo said that it would be easier to believe the peace offerings of the worst war-mongering, running-dog imperialist who had ever lived than it would be for him to believe Chai's story of mysterious victimization and ultimate innocence. Liu Hsiang-kuo said that he would rather sleep with vipers and eat with tigers and live with scorpions than turn his back to Chai Po-han.

Chai Po-han said that apparently Liu Hsiang-kuo thought he was lying about all of this.

Liu Hsiang-kuo said this was exactly, wonderfully true.

For the remainder of their stay in the United States and for the entire two weeks they spent in France, Chai Po-han was watched closely. He was never allowed to go anywhere by himself for fear that female pawns of the capitalists would convert him into a mad, raging counterrevolutionary by cleverly manipulating his genitals. One could not guess what techniques these Western women knew — although one had surely heard the shocking stories. So Chai was informally but rigorously guarded. And on their return trip to Peking, when their aircraft stopped to refuel in Chungking, Chai Po-han was taken from his group and given orders to report to the Ssunan Commune forthwith so that, by associating with working peasants, he could be “reeducated in Maoist thought and purged of his counterrevolutionary and nonrevolutionary interests and weaknesses.”

He had been framed, and now that he'd had enough time to think about it, he knew why. His father was a great and much-respected man — but he had enemies just the same. The elder Chai was far too powerful for anyone to risk an overt attack on him. He knew too much about other high government officials to allow himself to be purged from the Party. He would not hesitate to use his knowledge to destroy anyone who attempted to usurp his authority. However, these faceless cowards might attempt to ruin Chai Chen-tse by discrediting his eldest and favorite son. That was the only explanation for these astounding events in Washington.

Soon after he had reported to the Ssunan Commune, Chai had sent word to his father that Chou P'eng-fei — and perhaps Liu Hsiang-kuo as well — had drugged him at dinner, soaked him with whiskey while he was unconscious, and placed a pair of Western women's decadently lacy underwear in his hands while he slept all unawares. Two weeks later a letter had arrived from the elder Chai, in which he assured his son that he had faith in him and knew he had been tricked; Chai Chen-tse also promised that his son would be ordered home from Ssunan before many weeks had passed. Relieved, Chai Po-han had waited for these new orders to come — had waited and waited and waited. Two days ago he had received another letter from his father, who assured him that he would soon be brought East from the wasteland of Kweichow. But he was no longer certain that his father could arrange it. And after six and a half months at Ssunan, he knew he would never again be happy living anywhere in the People's Republic, for his trust in Maoism and the dictatorship of the proletariat had been broken by too many fourteen-hour days of brutal, semi-enforced labor.

Now, beyond the discolored window glass, dawn had come while he stared at the River Wu and thought over his predicament. And now, outside of the commune director's quarters, the gong sounded which signaled the beginning of a new workday.

Behind Chai, the other men of this dormitory — a fraction of the comrades, both women and men, who lived at Ssunan — got to their feet and stretched. They rolled up their thin mattresses and bound them with cord and hung them from specially rigged poles so that — if a storm should come and rain should wash across the dormitory floor — their beds would not be prey to a capricious Nature. One by one, then in twos and threes, they dressed and went outside, heading toward the men's latrines. When he could not delay any longer, Chai Po-han had followed them.

From the latrines they filed to an open-air kitchen, where they were given two bowls each: one filled with rice and large chunks of stewed chicken, the other containing orange slices and pieces of hard yellow bread. Here and there young courting couples sat together to eat, although they maintained a respectable yard of open space between them. For the most part the peasants ate together, the students ate together, and a third group of nonstudent transferees from the cities ate in circles of their friends.

Chai was sitting in one of these circles, finishing his breakfast, when the commune director brought him a large envelope. “For you, Comrade.” The director was a short, squat man with an enormous chest and thick biceps. He never smiled. Now he seemed to be frowning more deeply than he usually did.

Chai took the envelope. “What is it?”

“You are being transferred from Ssunan,” the director said.

Chai quickly opened the envelope.

K'ang Chiu-yeh, Chai's closest friend at the commune, stopped eating. He set his bowls aside on the earth and came up onto his knees. He shuffled closer to Chai and said, “Transferred to where, my friend?”

“Back to Peking,” Chai said.

“How wonderful!”

Chai said nothing.

“But you should rejoice!” K'ang said. “And instead, you look at me as if you've just found weevils in your rice.” He laughed. Unlike the director, K'ang had a marvelous smile and used it often.

Five months ago it would have been the most wonderful news that Chai could have received. But not now. He said as much.

“But that makes no sense,” K'ang said. “Certainly, it would have been better if it had come five months ago. But it is no less a good thing for having come late.”

Chai looked at his friend and felt a great sadness well up in him. K'ang had been a medical student at Shanghai University before his name had appeared on a list of thirty-seven thousand young people who were to leave Shanghai in order to serve the proletariat and the Maoist cause in the Fifty-Year Farm Program. K'ang was not going home; he would not leave Ssunan for years and perhaps not ever. K'ang did not have a powerful father; therefore, his duty would remain with the Fifty-Year Farm Program.

“What is the matter?” K'ang asked him.

Chai said nothing.

K'ang shook him by the shoulder.

Chai thought of the thousands of displaced young men and women who were in no better position than K'ang. Tens of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands… Now, instead of laughing aloud at his transfer as he would have done five months ago, Chai Po-han began to weep.

He was going home.