Authors: Robert Ludlum
“
Someone …! Help
me!” The words were lost; only guttural, muted cries came out of his mouth. He limped, his swollen ankle and damaged leg barely able to support him. Where
was
everybody? No one was there … no one behind the counter! Then two nurses came casually through a door at the far end of the hallway, and he raised his right hand, waving it frantically as the words finally came. “
Help me …!
”
“Oh, my
God
!” screamed one of the women as both rushed forward. Simultaneously, Kendrick heard another set of racing feet. He spun around only to watch helplessly as the heavy,
muscular nurse ran out of his room and down the hall to a door beneath a red-lettered
EXIT
sign. She crashed it open and disappeared.
“Call the doctor down in emergency!” cried the navy nurse who reached him first. “
Hurry
. He’s bleeding all over the place!”
“Then I’d better reach the Rashad girl,” said the second nurse, heading for the counter. “She’s to be called with any change of status, and,
Jesus
, this is certainly that!”
“
No!
” yelled Evan, his voice at last a clear, if breathless, roar. “Leave her alone!”
“But Congressman—”
“Please do as I say.
Don’t call her!
She hasn’t slept in two or three days. Just get the doctor and help me back to my room.… Then I have to use the phone.”
Forty-five minutes later, his shoulder resutured and his face and neck cleaned up, Kendrick sat in bed, the telephone in his lap, and dialed the number in Washington he had committed to memory. Against strenuous objections, he had ordered the doctor and the nurses not to call the military police or even the hospital’s security. It had been established that no one on the floor knew the heavyset woman other than a name, obviously false, through transfer papers; which had been presented that afternoon from the base hospital in Pensacola, Florida. Ranking officer nurses were coveted additions to any staff; no one questioned her arrival and no one would stop her in her swift departure. And until the whole picture was clearer, there could be no official investigations triggering new stories in the media. The blackout was still in effect.
“Sorry to wake you, Mitch—”
“
Evan?
”
“You’d better know what happened.” Kendrick described the all too real nightmare he had lived through, including his decision to avoid the police, civilian and military. “Maybe I was wrong, but I figured the moment she reached that exit door there wasn’t much chance of getting her and every chance of hitting the papers if they tried.”
“You were right,” agreed Payton, speaking rapidly. “She was a hired gun—”
“Pillow,” corrected Evan.
“Every bit as lethal if you hadn’t woken up. The point is, hired killers plan ahead, usually with several different exits and an equal number of changes of clothes. You did the right thing.”
“Who hired her, Mitch?”
“I’d say it’s pretty obvious. Grinell did. He’s been a malignantly busy man since he got off that island.”
“What do you mean? Khalehla didn’t tell me.”
“Khalehla, as you call her, doesn’t know. She has enough stress with you on her hands. How is she taking tonight?”
“She hasn’t been told. I wouldn’t let them call her.”
“She’ll be furious.”
“At least she’ll get some sleep. What about Grinell?”
“Ardis Vanvlanderen’s lawyer is dead and the ledger is no-where to be found. Grinell’s people got to San Jacinto first.”
“
Goddamnit!
” shouted Kendrick hoarsely. “We’ve lost it!”
“It would appear so, but there’s something that doesn’t quite add up.… Do you recall my telling you that all Grinell needed in order to know we were closing in was someone watching the attorney’s house?”
“Certainly.”
“Gingerbread found him.”
“
And?
”
“If they did get that book, why station a lookout after the fact? Indeed, why risk it?”
“Force the lookout to tell you! Drug him up, you’ve done it before.”
“Gingerbread thinks not.”
“
Why
not?”
“Two reasons. The man may be a low-scale watchman who knows absolutely nothing, and second, Gingerbread wants to follow him.”
“You mean this Gingerbread found the lookout but the lookout doesn’t know it?”
“I told you he was good. Grinell’s man doesn’t even know we found the dead lawyer. All he saw was a company truck and two gardeners in Green Thumb coveralls who proceeded to mow the lawns.”
“But if the lookout’s so low-scale, what will Gingerbread—Christ, that’s a dumb name—what will he learn by following him?”
“I said he
may
be low-scale with only a relay telephone number to call periodically that wouldn’t tell us anything. On the other hand, he may
not
be. If he’s upscale he could lead us to others.”
“For God’s sake, Mitch, drug him and find out!”
“You’re not following me, Evan. A relay phone is called
periodically
… at specific times. If the schedule’s broken, we send Grinell the wrong message.”
“You’re all convoluted fruitcakes,” said a weakened, exasperated Kendrick.
“It’s not much of a living, either.… I’ll have a couple of shore patrols placed at your door. Try to get some rest.”
“What about you? I know you said you couldn’t fly out here and now I understand why, but you’re still at the office, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m waiting to hear from Gingerbread. I can work faster from here.”
“You don’t want to talk about yesterday morning—about your meeting with the honcho from that Inver Brass?”
“Perhaps tomorrow. It’s no longer urgent. Without him there is no Inver Brass.”
“Without him?”
“He killed himself.… Merry Christmas, Congressman.”
Khalehla Rashad dropped the packages in her arms and screamed. “What
happened
?” she cried, rushing to the bed.
“Medicare’s a bunch of bullshit,” replied Evan.
“That’s not
funny
!… The SPs at your door and the way they looked at my ID downstairs when I said I was coming to see you—what
happened
?”
He told her, omitting the parts about the replaced stitches and the blood in the hallway. “Mitch agrees with what I did.”
“I’ll have his
head
!” yelled Khalehla. “He should have
called
me!”
“Then you wouldn’t look as lovely as you do. The shadows around your eyes are only half black. You slept.”
“Twelve hours,” she admitted, sitting on the edge of the bed. “That
sweet
pudgy
nurse
? I can’t believe it!”
“I could have used some of your black belt, first class, training. I don’t make a point of fighting very often, and hardly ever with women—except hookers who overcharge.”
“Remind me never to let you pay.… Oh,
God
, Evan, I knew I should have insisted on a larger room with two beds and
stayed
with you!”
“Don’t carry this protective routine too far, kid. I
am
the man, remember?”
“And you remember that if we’re ever mugged, let
me
make the moves, all right?”
“There goeth all my masculine pride.… Be my guest, just feed me bonbons and champagne while you beat the hell out of the bastards.”
“Only a man could even joke like that,” said Rashad, bending down and kissing him. “I
love
you so, that’s my problem.”
“Not mine.” They kissed again and quite naturally the telephone rang. “Don’t yell!” he insisted. “It’s probably Mitch.” It was.
“
Breakthrough!
” exclaimed the director of Special Projects from Langley, Virginia. “Has Evan told you? About Grinell?”
“No, nothing.”
“Put him on, he can explain things to you—”
“Why didn’t you
call
me last night—this morning?”
“
Put
him on!”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is it, Mitch?”
“The break we’ve needed—we’ve got it!”
“Gingerbread?”
“Oddly enough, no. From an entirely different source. You look for crazy things in this business and sometimes you find them. On an outside chance we sent a man to the offices of Mrs. Vanvlanderen’s attorney with a mocked-up document permitting him access to the files of the Vice President’s late chief of staff. In her employer’s absence the secretary wasn’t about to let anyone prowl around the files, so she called the San Jacinto house. Knowing she wouldn’t get an answer, our man hung in there for a couple of hours playing the angry Washington official with orders from the National Security Council while she kept trying to reach the lawyer. Apparently she was genuinely upset; he was supposed to be in an all-day conference out there with important clients.… Whether it was frustration or self-defense that made her say it, we don’t know and don’t care, but she blurted out the fact that our man probably wanted all those confidential pages she’d Xeroxed, but he couldn’t get them anyway because they were all in a safety box down in a bank vault.”
“
Bingo
,” said Evan quietly, inwardly shouting.
“Unquestionably. She even described the ledger.… Our astute attorney was perfectly willing to sell Grinell the book, then proceed to blackmail him with the copy. Grinell’s lookout was in San Jacinto for simple curiosity, nothing more, and the ledger will be ours within the hour.”
“Get it, Mitch, and break it down! Look for a man named Hamendi, Abdel Hamendi.”
“The arms dealer,” said Payton, confirming the information. “Adrienne told me. The photographs in Vanvlanderen’s apartment—Lausanne, Amsterdam.”
“That’s the one. They’ll use a code name for him, of course, but trace the money, the transfers in Geneva and Zurich—the Gemeinschaft Bank in Zurich.”
“Naturally.”
“There’s something else, Mitch. Let’s clean house as much as we can. A man like Hamendi supplies arms to all the fanatic splinter groups he can find, each side killing the other with what he sells them. Then he looks for other killers, the ones in thousand-dollar suits and sitting in plush offices whose only cause is money, and he brings them into his network.… Production increases ten times what it was, then twenty, and there’s more killing, more causes to sell to, more fanatics to fuel.… Let’s take him out, Mitch. Let’s give a part of this screwed-up world a chance to breathe—without his supplies.”
“It’s a tall order, Evan.”
“Give me a few weeks to get patched together, then send me back to Oman.”
“
What?
”
“I’m going to make the biggest purchase of weapons Hamendi ever dreamed of.”
Sixteen days passed, Christmas a painful memory, the New Year greeted cautiously, with suspicion. On the fourth day Evan had visited Emilio Carallo and given him a photograph of a fine new fishing boat, along with its ownership papers, a prepaid course for his captain’s license, a bankbook, and a guarantee that no one from the island of Passage to China would ever bother him in El Descanso. It was the truth; of the selected brethren of the inner government who had conferred on that insidious government’s island, none cared to acknowledge it. Instead, they huddled with their batteries of lawyers, and several had fled the country. They were not concerned with a crippled fisherman in El Descanso. They were concerned with saving their lives and their fortunes.
On the eighth day the ground swell came out of Chicago and rolled through the Middle West. It started with four independent newspapers within a sixty-mile radius editorially proposing the candidacy of Congressman Evan Kendrick for the vice presidential nomination. Within seventy-two hours three more were added, in addition to six television stations owned by five of the
papers. Proposals became endorsements and the voices of the journalistic turtles were heard in the land. From New York to Los Angeles, Bismarck to Houston, Boston to Miami, the brotherhood of media giants began studying the concept, and the editors of
Time
and
Newsweek
called emergency meetings. Kendrick was moved to an isolated wing of the base hospital and his name removed from the roster of patients. In Washington, Annie Mulcahy O’Reilly and the staff informed hundreds of callers that the representative from Colorado was out of the country and not available for comment.
On the eleventh day the Congressman and his lady returned to Mesa Verde, where to their astonishment they found Emmanuel Weingrass, a small cylinder of oxygen strapped to his side in case of a respiratory emergency, overseeing an army of carpenters repairing the house. Manny’s pace was slower and he sat down a great deal, but his illness had no effect on his ever present irascibility. It was a constant; the only time he lowered his voice even a decibel was when he spoke with Khalehla—his “lovely new daughter, worth much more than the bum who is always hanging around.”
On the fifteenth day Mitchell Payton, working with a young computer genius he had borrowed from Frank Swann at State, broke the codes of Grinell’s ledger, the bible according to the inner government. Working through the night with Gerald Bryce at the keyboard, the two men compiled a report for President Langford Jennings, who told them exactly how many printouts were to be made. One additional report rolled out of the word processor before the disk was destroyed, but MJ was not aware of it.
One by one the limousines arrived at night, not at a darkened estate on Chesapeake Bay but instead at the south portico of the White House. The passengers were escorted by marine guards to the Oval Office of the President of the United States. Langford Jennings sat behind his desk, his feet on a favorite ottoman to the left of his chair, acknowledging with a nod everyone who came—all but one. Vice President Orson Bollinger was simply stared at, no greeting extended, only contempt. The chairs were arranged in a semicircle in front of the desk and the awesome man behind it. Included in the entourage, each carrying a single manila envelope, were the majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress, the Acting Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, the directors of the Central Intelligence and the
National Security agencies, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Attorney General and Mitchell Jarvis Payton, Special Projects, CIA. All sat down and waited in silence. The waiting was not long.