Authors: Robert Ludlum
Three hours and four minutes later, Milos Varak snapped off the projector. Two hours and seven minutes after that moment, the questions ended and Varak left the room.
“To paraphrase our friend out of context,” said Winters. “A nod from each of you signifies consent. Shake your head if it’s negative. We’ll start with Jacob.”
Slowly, pensively, one by one the members of Inver Brass nodded their consent.
“It is agreed, then,” continued Winters. “Congressman Evan Kendrick will be the next Vice President of the United States. He will become President eleven months after the election of the incumbent. The code name is Icarus, to be taken as a warning, a fervent prayer that he will not, like so many of his predecessors have done, try to fly too close to the sun and crash into the sea. And may God have mercy on our souls.”
Representative Kendrick from Colorado’s Ninth Congressional District sat at his office desk watching his stern-faced secretary as she kept chattering away about priority mail, House agendas, pre-floor position papers and social functions he really
must
attend, his chief aide’s judgment notwithstanding. Her lips kept opening and closing with the rapidity of machine-gun fire, the nasal sounds emanating not much lower in the decibel count.
“
There
, Congressman, that’s the schedule for the week.”
“It’s really something, Annie. But can’t you simply send out
a blanket letter to everyone saying I’ve got a social disease and don’t want to infect any of them?”
“Evan,
stop
it,” cried Ann Mulcahy O’Reilly, a very determined middle-aged veteran of Washington. “You’re being sloughed off around here and I won’t have it! You know what they’re saying here on the Hill? They say you don’t give a damn, that you spent a bundle of money just to meet girls as rich as yourself.”
“Do you believe that, Annie?”
“How the hell could I? You never
go
anywhere, never
do
anything. I’d praise the saints if you got caught naked in the Reflecting Pool with the biggest tootsie in Washington! Then I’d know you were
doing
something.”
“Maybe I don’t want to do anything.”
“Damn it, you should! I’ve typed your positions on a dozen issues and they’re light-years better than eighty percent of the clowns here, but nobody pays any attention.”
“They’re buried because they’re not popular, Annie; I’m not popular. They don’t want me in either camp. The few who notice me on both sides have pinned so many labels on me they cancel themselves out. They can’t pigeonhole me so they bury me, which isn’t very difficult because I don’t complain.”
“God knows
I
don’t agree with you a lot of the time, but I know a mind at work when I see it.… Forget it, Congressman. What are your replies?”
“Later. Has Manny called?”
“I put him off twice. I wanted to get in my session with you.”
Kendrick leaned forward, his light blue eyes cold, bordering on anger. “Don’t ever do that again, Annie. There’s nothing so important to me as that man in Colorado.”
“Yes, sir.” O’Reilly lowered her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” said Evan quickly, “that wasn’t called for. You’re trying to do your job and I’m not much help. Sorry, again.”
“Don’t apologize. I know what you’ve been through with Mr. Weingrass and what he means to you—how often did I bring your work to the hospital? I had no right to interfere.
On
the other hand, I
am
trying to do my job and you’re not always the most cooperative boss on the Hill.”
“There are other hills I’d rather be on—”
“I’m aware of that, so we’ll cross out the social functions; you’d probably do yourself more harm than good anyway.” Ann O’Reilly got out of the chair and placed a file folder on Kendrick’s
desk. “But I think you should look at a proposal from your senatorial colleague from Colorado. I think he wants to chop off the top of a mountain and put in a reservoir. In this town, that usually means a lake followed by high-rise condominiums.”
“That transparent son of a
bitch
,” said Evan, whipping open the folder.
“I’ll also get Mr. Weingrass on the phone for you.”
“Still
Mr.
Weingrass?” asked Evan, turning over pages. “You won’t relent? I’ve heard him tell you to call him Manny dozens of times.”
“Oh, now and then I do, but it’s not easy.”
“Why? Because he yells?”
“Mother of God, no. You can’t take offense at that if you’re married to a two-toilet Irish detective.”
“Two-toilet—?” Kendrick looked up.
“An old Boston expression, but, no, it’s not the yelling.”
“What, then?”
“A whimsy of humor he keeps repeating. He keeps saying to me over and over—especially when I call him by his first name. ‘Kid,’ he says, ‘I think we’ve got a vaudeville act here. We’ll call it Manny’s Irish Annie, what do you say?’ And I say, ‘Not a hell of a lot, Manny,’ and he says, ‘Leave my friend, the animal, and fly away with me. He’ll understand my undying passion,’ and I say to him that the T.T. cop doesn’t understand his own.”
“Don’t tell your husband,” offered Kendrick, chuckling.
“Oh, but I did. All
he
said was that he’d buy the airline tickets. Of course, he and Weingrass got drunk a couple of times—”
“Got drunk? I didn’t even know they’d met.”
“My fault—to my undying regret. It was when you flew to Denver about eight months ago—”
“I remember. The state conference, and Manny was still in the hospital. I asked you to go see him, take him the Paris
Tribune
.”
“And I brought Paddy with me during the evening visiting hours. I’m no centerfold, but even
I’m
not walking these streets at night, and the T.T. cop’s got to be good for something.”
“What happened?”
“They got along like a shot and a beer. I had to work late one night that week and Paddy insisted on going to the hospital himself.”
Evan shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Annie. I never knew. I didn’t mean to involve you and your husband in my private life. And Manny never told me.”
“Probably the Listerine bottles.”
“The what?”
“Same color as light Scotch. I’ll get him on the phone.”
Emmanuel Weingrass leaned against the formation of rock on top of a hill belonging to Kendrick’s thirty-acre spread at the base of the mountains. His short-sleeved checkered shirt was unbuttoned to the waist as he took the sun, breathing the clear air of the southern Rockies. He glanced at his chest, at the scars of the surgery, and wondered for a brief moment whether he should believe in God or in Evan Kendrick. The doctors had told him—months after the operation and numerous post-op checkups—that they had cut out the dirty little cells that were eating his life away. He was clean, they pronounced. Pronounced to a man who, on this day, on this rock, claimed he was eighty years of age with the sun beating down on his frail body. Frail and not so frail, for he moved better, spoke better—coughed practically not at all. Yet he missed his Gauloise cigarettes and the Monte Cristo cigars he enjoyed so much. So what could they do? Stop his life a few weeks or months before a logical ending?
He looked over at his nurse in the shade of a nearby tree next to the ever-present golf cart. She was one of the round-the-clock females who accompanied him everywhere, and he wondered what she would do if he propositioned her while leaning casually against the boulder. Such potential responses had always intrigued him, but generally the reality merely amused him.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he called out.
“Simply gorgeous,” was the reply.
“What do you say we take all our clothes off and really enjoy it?”
The nurse’s expression did not change for an instant. Her response was calm, deliberate, even gentle. “Mr. Weingrass, I’m here to look after you, not give you cardiac arrest.”
“Not bad. Not bad at all.”
The radio telephone on the golf cart hummed; the woman walked over to it and snapped it out of its recess. After a brief conversation capped with quiet laughter, she turned to Manny. “The Congressman’s calling you, Mr. Weingrass.”
“You don’t laugh like that with a congressman,” said Manny, pushing himself away from the rock. “Five’ll get you twenty it’s Annie Glocamorra telling lies about me.”
“She did ask if I’d strangled you yet.” The nurse handed the phone to Weingrass.
“Annie, this woman’s a
letch
!”
“We try to be of service,” said Evan Kendrick.
“Boy, that girl of yours gets off the phone pretty damned quick.”
“Forewarned, forearmed, Manny. You called. Is everything all right?”
“I should only call in a crisis?”
“You rarely call, period. That privilege is almost exclusively mine. What is it?”
“You got any money left?”
“I can’t spend the interest. Sure. Why?”
“You know the addition we built on the west porch so you got a view?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve been playing with some sketches. I think you should have a terrace on top. Two steel beams would carry the load; maybe a third if you went for a glass-blocked steam bath by the wall.”
“Glass-blocked …? Hey, that sounds terrific. Go ahead.”
“Good. I’ve got the plumbers coming out in the morning. But when it’s done,
then
I go back to Paris.”
“Whatever you say, Manny. However, you said you’d work up some plans for a gazebo down by the streams, where they merge.”
“
You
said you didn’t want to walk that far.”
“I’ve changed my mind. It’d be a good place for a person to get away and think.”
“That excludes the owner of this establishment.”
“You’re all heart. I’m coming back next week for a few days.”
“I can’t wait,” said Weingrass, raising his voice and looking over at the nurse. “When you get here, you can take these heavy-breathing sex maniacs off my hands!”
It was shortly past 10:00
P.M.
when Milos Varak walked down the deserted hallway in the House Office Building. He had been admitted by prearrangement, a late-night visitor of one Congressman Arvin Partridge of Alabama. Varak reached the heavy wooden door with the brass plate centered in the sculptured panel and knocked. Within seconds it was opened by a slender man in his early twenties whose eyes looked out anxiously from behind large tortoiseshell glasses. Whoever he was, he was not the gruff, savvy chairman of the Partridge “Gang,” that investigative committee determined to find out why the armed services
were getting so little for so much. Not in terms of $1,200 toilet seats and $700 pipe wrenches; those were too blatant to be taken seriously and might even be correctable diversions. What concerned the “Birds”—another sobriquet—were the 500 percent overruns and the restricted degree of competitive bidding in defense contracts. What they had only begun to uncover, of course, was a river of corruption with so many tributaries there weren’t enough scouts to pursue them in the canoes available.
“I’m here to see Congressman Partridge,” said the blond man, his Czech accent not lost on but conceivably misconstrued by the slender young man at the door.
“Did you …?” began the apparent congressional aide awkwardly. “I mean when you saw the guards downstairs—”
“If you’re asking me whether or not I was checked for firearms, of course I was, and you should know it. They called you from Security. The Congressman, please. He’s expecting me.”
“Certainly, sir. He’s in his office. This way, sir.” The nervous aide led Milos to a second large door. The younger man knocked. “Congressman—”
“Tell him to come in!” ordered the loud Southern voice from inside. “And you stay out there and take any calls. I don’t care if it’s the Speaker or the President, I’m not here!”
“Go right in,” said the aide, opening the door.
Varak was tempted to tell the agitated young man that he was a friendly liaison from the KGB, but decided against it. The aide was there for a reason; few phone calls came to the House Office Building at this hour. Milos stepped inside the large, ornate room with the profusion of photographs on the desk, walls and tables, all in one way or another attesting to Partridge’s influence, patriotism and power. The man himself, standing by a draped window, was not as impressive as he appeared in the photographs. He was short and overweight, with a puffed, angry face and thinning dyed hair.
“Ah don’t know what you’re sellin’, Blondie,” said the congressman, walking forward like an enraged pigeon, “but if it’s what I think it is, I’ll take you down so fast you’ll wish you had a parachute.”
“I’m not selling anything, sir, I’m giving something away. Something of considerable value, in fact.”
“
Muleshit!
You want some kind of fuckin’ cover-up and I’m not givin’ it!”
“My clients seek no cover-up and certainly I don’t. But I submit, Congressman,
you
may.”
“
Bull!
I listened to you on the phone—you
heard
something, somebody mentioned drugs and I’d better
listen
—so I made some damn clear inquiries and found out what I had to know, what I knew was the truth! We’re clean here, clean as a ’Bama stream! Now, I want to find out who sent
you
, what thief in what larcenous boardroom thought he could scare me with this kind of
crap
?”
“I don’t think you’d want this kind of ‘crap’ made public, sir. The information is devastating.”
“
Information?
Words! Innuendo! Rumors,
gossip
! Like that black kid who tried to indict the whole gawdamned
Congress
with his lies!”
“No rumors, no gossip,” said Milos Varak, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Only photographs.” The Czech from Inver Brass threw the white envelope on the desk.
“
What?
” Partridge went instantly to the envelope; he sat down and tore it open, pulling the photographs out one by one and holding them under the green-shelled desk lamp. His eyes widened as his face went white, then blood-red in fury. What he saw was beyond anything he might have imagined. There were various couples, trios and quartets of partly and fully naked young people using straws with white powder strewn on tables; hastily taken blurred shots of syringes, pills, and bottles of beer and whisky; finally, clear photographs of several couples making love.