Authors: Robert Ludlum
The widow collapsed back into the couch, her long neck arched, her eyes closed. “Eight hundred million,” she whispered. “That’s what he said. Eight hundred million for him alone, billions for all the rest of you.”
“He never told you what he was doing, what he had done?”
“Good
Christ
, no! I’d have put a bullet in his head and called one of you to deep-six him in Mexico.”
“I believe you.”
“Will the
others
?” Ardis sat up, her eyes pleading.
“Oh, I think so. They know you.”
“I swear to you, Eric, I didn’t know a
thing
!”
“I said I believed you.”
“The Rashad woman told me they were tracing the money he sent through Zurich. Can they
do
that?”
“If I knew Andrew, it would take them months. His coded pay-in sources ranged from South Africa to the Baltic. Months, a year, perhaps.”
“Will the others know that?”
“We’ll see what they say.”
“What?…
Eric!
”
“I called Grinell from the airport in Baltimore. He’s no part of Bollinger’s staff and God knows he stays in the background, but if we have a chairman of the board, I think we’d all agree he’s the fellow.”
“Eric, what are you telling me?” asked Mrs. Vanvlanderen, her voice flat.
“He’ll be here in a few minutes. We agreed we should have a talk. I wanted a little time with you alone, but he should be here shortly.” Sundstrom glanced at his watch.
“You’ve got that glassy look in your eyes, lover boy,” said Ardis, slowly getting up from the couch.
“Oh, yes,” agreed the scientist. “The one you always laughed at when I couldn’t … shall we say, perform.”
“Your mind was so often on other things. You’re such a brilliant man.”
“Yes, I know. You once said that you always knew when I was solving a problem. I went limp.”
“I loved your mind. I still love it.”
“How could you? You don’t really have one yourself, so how would you know.”
“Eric, Grinell
frightens
me.”
“He doesn’t frighten me. He has a mind.”
The chimes of the front door filled the Vanvlanderen suite.
Kendrick sat in a small canvas chair by the cot in the cabin of the jet that was flying them to Denver. Emmanuel Weingrass, his wounds prevented from further bleeding by the surviving nurse in Mesa Verde, kept blinking his dark eyes, made darker by the lined white flesh surrounding them.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Manny with difficulty, half coughing the words.
“Don’t talk,” broke in Evan. “Conserve your strength. Please?”
“Oh, get off it,” replied the old man. “What have I got? Twenty more years and I don’t get laid?”
“Will you
stop
it?”
“No, I won’t stop it. Five years I don’t see you, so we get back together and what happens? You get too attached—to
me
. What are you, a
feygele
with a hang-up for old guys?… Don’t answer that, Khalehla will do it for you. You two must have busted your parts last night.”
“Why don’t you ever talk like a normal person?”
“Because normalcy bores me, just like you’re beginning to bore me.… Don’t you know what all this shit is about? I brought up a dummy? You can’t figure?”
“No, I can’t figure, all
right
?”
“That lovely girl was on the button. Someone wants to make you very important in this country, and someone else is having bowel movements over the prospect. You can’t
see
that?”
“I’m beginning to, and I hope the other guys win. I don’t want to be important.”
“Maybe you should be. Maybe it’s where you belong.”
“Who the hell says so? Who thinks so?”
“The people who don’t
want
you—you think about that. Khalehla told us that these garbage maniacs who came over here to kill you didn’t just hop on a plane from Paris or walk off a cruise ship. They had help, influential help. How did she put it?… Passports, weapons, money—even driver’s licenses and clothes and hideouts. Those things, especially the paperwork, you don’t pick up at Walgreen’s. They take contacts with power in high places, and the people who can pull those kinds of strings are the bastards who want you dead.… Why? Does the outspoken Congressman pose a threat to them?”
“How can I be a threat? I’m getting out.”
“They don’t know that. All they see is a mensch politician who, when he opens his mouth, everybody in Washington shuts up and listens to him.”
“I don’t talk that much, so the listening’s minor, practically nonexistent.”
“The point is that when you do talk, they don’t. You got what I call listening credentials. Like I do, frankly.” Weingrass coughed, bringing a trembling hand to his throat. Evan bent over him, concerned.
“Take it easy, Manny.”
“Be quiet,” ordered the old man. “You hear what I’ve got to say.… Those bastards see a real American hero who’s awarded a big medal by the President and put on important committees in the Congress—”
“The committees came before the medal—”
“Don’t interrupt. After a couple of months the sequence of things blurs—anyway, you just made it stronger. This hero takes on the Pentagon brass over national television
before
he’s a hero and damn near indicts the whole damned bunch of them as well as all those big industrial complexes who supply the machine. Then what does he do? He
demands
accountability. Terrific word, ‘accountability’—the bastards all hate it. They’ve got to start sweating, kid. They’ve got to figure that maybe this joker-hero will get more powerful, maybe chair one of those committees, or even get elected to the Senate, where he could do some real damage.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Your girlfriend wasn’t!” countered Weingrass loudly, staring into Kendrick’s eyes. “She told us that her elite group may have tapped into a nerve center higher up in the government than they want to think about.… Doesn’t all this present a blueprint to you, although I admit you were never the hottest shot with a blueprint I ever knew?”
“Of course it does,” answered Evan, nodding slowly. “There’s no nation in the world that doesn’t have its degrees of corruption, and I doubt there ever will be.”
“Oh,
corruption
?” intoned Manny, eyes rolling, as if the word were part of a Talmudic chant. “Like in one guy stealing a buck’s worth of paper clips from the office and another taking a million with a cost overrun, is that what you mean?”
“Basically, yes. Or ten million, if you like.”
“Insignificant
peanuts
!” shouted Weingrass. “Such people do not deal with Palestinian terrorists thousands of miles away for the sole purpose of positively removing themselves from a
kill
. They wouldn’t know
how
! Also, you didn’t look into that lovely girl’s eyes, or maybe you don’t know what to look for. You’ve never been there.”
“She says she knows where you’re coming from because you
have
been there. All right, I haven’t, so what are you talking about?”
“When you’re there, you’re scared,” said the old man. “You’re walking toward a black drape that you’re going to pull down. You’re excited; the curiosity’s killing you and so is the
fear. All of those things. You try like hell to suppress them, even hide some from yourself, and that’s part of it because you can’t afford to lose an ounce of control. But it’s all there. Because once that drape is yanked away you know you’ll be looking at something so
nuts
you wonder if anyone will believe it.”
“You saw all that in her eyes?”
“Enough, yes.”
“Why?”
“She’s getting near the edge, kid.”
“
Why
?”
“Because we’re not dealing—she’s not dealing—with simple corruption, even terrific corruption. What’s behind that black curtain is a government within the government, a bunch of servants running the master’s house.” The old architect suddenly went into a spasm of coughing, his whole body trembling, his eyes shut tight. Kendrick grabbed his arms; in moments the convulsion was over and Manny blinked again, breathing deeply. “Listen to me, my dumb son,” he whispered. “Help her, really help her, and help Payton. Find the bastards and rip them
out
!”
“Of course I will, you know that.”
“I
hate
them! That youngster under chemicals, that Ahbyahd you knew in Masqat—we might have been friends in another time. But that time won’t ever come as long as there are bastards who pit ourselves against ourselves because they make billions out of hatred.”
“It’s not that simple, Manny—”
“It’s a larger part of it than you
think
! I’ve
seen
it!… ‘They have more than you do, so we’ll sell you more than
they
have’—that’s one of the come-ons. Or ‘They’ll kill you unless you kill them first, so here’s the firepower—for a price.’ It goes right up the goddamned ladder: ‘They spent twenty million on a missile, we’ll spend
forty
million!’ Do we really want to blow up the fucking planet? Or is everyone listening to lunatics who listen to men who sell hatred and peddle fear?”
“On that level, it’s that simple,” said Evan, smiling. “I may even have mentioned it myself.”
“Keep mentioning it, kid. Don’t walk away from that platform we talked about—mainly regarding a certain Herbert Dennison we also talked about who you scared the shit out of. Remember, you got listening credentials like me. Use ’em.”
“I’ll have to think about it, Manny.”
“Well, while you’re thinking,” coughed Weingrass, his right
hand on his chest, “why don’t you think about why you had to lie to me? You and the doctors, that is.”
“What?”
“It’s back, Evan. It’s back and it’s worse because it never went away.”
“What’s back?”
“ ‘Big casino,’ I think is the gentle phrase. The cancer’s running rampant.”
“No, it
isn’t
. We ran you through a dozen tests. They got it—you’re clean.”
“Tell that to these little suckers who are choking off my air.”
“I’m no doctor, Manny, but I don’t think that’s a symptom. During the last thirty-six hours you’ve been through a couple of wars. It’s a wonder you can breathe at all.”
“Yeah, but while they’re patching me up at the hospital you have them run one of those little checks, and don’t lie to me. There are some people in Paris I’ve got to take care of, some things I’ve got locked away they should have. So don’t lie to me, understand?”
“I won’t lie to you,” said Kendrick as the aircraft started its descent into Denver.
Crayton Grinell was a slender man of medium height and a perpetually gray face made prominent by sharp prominent features. When greeting someone, for the first time or the fiftieth, whether a waiter or a board chairman, the forty-eight-year-old attorney who specialized in international law greeted that person with a shy smile that conveyed warmth. The warmth and the modesty were accepted readily until one looked into Grinell’s eyes. It was not that they were cold, for they were not, yet neither were they particularly friendly; they were expressionless, neutral, the eyes of a cautiously curious cat.
“Ardis, my
dear
Ardis,” said the lawyer, walking into the foyer and holding the widow, gently patting her shoulder as one might console a faintly disagreeable aunt who had lost a far more agreeable husband. “What can I say? What can anyone say? Such a loss for us all, but how much more so for you.”
“It was sudden, Cray. Too sudden.”
“Of course it was, but we must all look for something positive in our sorrows, mustn’t we? You and he were spared a prolonged and agonizing illness. Since the end must come, it’s better if it’s quick, isn’t it?”
“I suppose you’re right. Thank you for reminding me.”
“Not at all.” Disengaging himself, Grinell looked over at Sundstrom, who was standing in the large sunken living room. “Eric, how good to see you,” he said solemnly, walking across the foyer and down the marble steps to shake hands with the scientist. “Somehow it’s right that we both should be with Ardis at a time like this. Incidentally, my men are outside in the hallway.”
“
Fucking bitch
!” Sundstrom muttered the words, his breath a whisper as the grieving Mrs. Vanvlanderen closed the door, the sound of the closing and the noise of her heels on the marble covering the mumble uttered by her former lover.
“Would you care for a drink, Cray?”
“Oh, no thank you.”
“I think I will,” said Ardis, heading for the dry bar.
“I think you should,” agreed the attorney.
“Is there anything I can do? At the legal end here, or with arrangements, anything at all?”
“I imagine you’ll be doing it, the legal things, I mean. Andy-boy had lawyers all over the place, but I gathered you were his main man.”
“Yes, I was, and we’ve all been in touch during the day. New York, Washington, London, Paris, Marseilles, Oslo, Stockholm, Bern, Zurich, West Berlin—I’m handling everything personally, of course.”
The widow stood motionless, a decanter halfway to her glass, staring at Grinell. “When I said ‘all over the place,’ I didn’t think
that
far all over the place.”
“His interests were extensive.”
“Zurich …?” said Ardis, as if the name of the city had slipped out unintentionally.
“It’s in
Switzerland
!” broke in Sundstrom harshly. “And let’s cut the crap.”
“Eric, really—”
“Don’t ‘Eric, really’
me
, Cray. That bullheaded horse’s ass did it. He contracted the Palestinians and paid them out of Zurich.… Remember Zurich,
sweetie
?… I told you in Baltimore, Cray. He
did
it!”
“I couldn’t get a confirmation on the assaults in Fairfax or Colorado,” said Grinell calmly.
“Because they never
happened
!” yelled the widow, her right hand trembling as she poured a drink from the heavy crystal decanter.
“I didn’t say that, Ardis,” objected the attorney softly. “I merely said I couldn’t get a confirmation. However, I did get a
later call, no doubt placed by a well-paid drunk who was handed a phone after the number was dialed, thus eliminating the identity of the source. The words he obviously repeated are all too familiar. ‘They’re following the money,’ he said.”