Ludlum, Robert - The Icarus Agenda

'No, not a try,' said Evan, reaching for her with his right hand. 'A lifetime,' he added. She bent down and they kissed, holding each other like two people who had nearly lost each other. And the telephone rang.

'Damn!' cried Khalehla, springing up.

'Am I that irresistible?'

'Hell, no, not you. It's not supposed to ring in here, those were my instructions!' She picked up the phone and spoke harshly. 'Yes, and whoever you are I'd like an explanation. How did you get through to this room?'

'The explanation, Officer Rashad,' said Mitchell Payton in Langley, Virginia, 'is comparatively simple. I countermanded a subordinate's order.'

'MJ, you haven't seen this man! He looks like a nuked Godzilla!'

'For a grown-up woman, Adrienne, one who has admitted in my presence that she's over thirty, you have an untidy habit of frequently talking like an adolescent… And I've also spoken to the doctors. Evan needs some rest and must keep his ankle strapped and his leg quiet for a day or so and his shoulder wound periodically checked, but beyond these minor inconveniences, he could go right back into the field.'

'You are one frozen fish, Uncle Mitch! He can barely talk.'

'Then why have you been talking to him?'

'How did you know…?'

'I didn't. You just told me… May we please deal with realities, my dear?'

'What's Evan? Unreal?'

'Give me that phone,' said Kendrick, awkwardly taking the instrument from Khalehla's hand. 'It's me, Mitch. What's happening?'

'How are you, Evan?… I suppose that's a foolish question.'

'Very. Answer mine.'

'Ardis Vanvlanderen's lawyer is at his summer house in the Sanjacinto Mountains. He called his office for messages and we got an area fix. A unit is on its way there now to evaluate. They should be there in a matter of minutes.'

'Evaluate? What the hell is there to evaluate? He's got the book! Go in and get it! It obviously spells out their whole global structure, every rotten arms merchant they've used in the world! Grinell can run to any of them and be hidden. Grab it!'

'You're forgetting about Grinell's own sense of survival. I assume Adrienne… Khalehla told you.'

'Yes, a seaplane picked him up. So what?'

'He wants that ledger as much as we do, and he's no doubt reached Mrs. Vanvlanderen's man by now. Grinell won't risk coming up himself, but he'll send someone he can trust to retrieve it. If he knows we're closing in, and all it would take is another pair of eyes on the lawyer's house, what do you suppose the instructions will be to his trusted courier who must, after all, get that book into Mexico?'

'Where he could be stopped at the border or in an airport—’

'With us in attendance. What do you think he'll tell that person?'

'To burn the damn thing,' said Kendrick quietly.

'Precisely.'

'I hope your men are good at what they do.'

'Two men, and one is just about the best we have. His name is Gingerbread; ask your friend about him.'

'Gingerbread? What kind of dumb name is that?'

'Later, Evan,' interrupted Payton. 'I've got something to tell you. I'm flying out to San Diego this afternoon and we have to talk. I hope you'll be up to it because it's urgent.'

'I'll be up to it, but why can't we talk now?'

'Because I wouldn't know what to say… I'm not sure I will later, but at least I'll have learned more. You see, I'm meeting with a man an hour from now, an influential man who's intensely interested in you—has been for the past year.'

Kendrick closed his eyes, feeling weak as he sank back into the pillows. 'He's with a group or a committee that calls itself… Inver Brass.'

'You know?'

'Only that much. I've no idea who they are or what they are, just that they've screwed up my life.'

The tan car, its coded government plates signifying the Central Intelligence Agency, drove through the imposing gates of the estate on Chesapeake Bay and up the circular drive to the smooth stone steps of the entrance. The tall man in an open raincoat that revealed a rumpled suit and shirt—evidence of nearly seventy-two hours' continuous wear—got out of the back seat and walked wearily up the steps towards the large, stately front door. He shivered briefly in the cold morning air of the overcast day that promised snow—snow for Christmas, reflected Payton. It was Christmas Eve, simply another day for the director of Special Projects, yet a day he dreaded, the impending meeting one he would trade several years of his life not to have insisted upon. Throughout his long career he had done many things that caused the bile to erupt in his stomach, but none more so than the destruction of good and moral men. He would destroy such a man this morning and he loathed himself for it, yet there was no alternative. For there was a higher good, a higher morality, and it was found in the reasonable laws of a nation of decent people. To abuse those laws was to deny the decency; accountability was paramount and constant. He rang the bell.

A maid preceded Payton through an enormous sitting room overlooking the bay to another stately door. She opened it and the director walked inside the extraordinary library, trying to absorb everything that struck his eyes. The huge console that took up the entire wall on the left with its panoply of television monitors and dials and projection equipment; the lowered silver screen on the right and the burning stove in the near corner; the cathedral windows directly opposite and the large circular table in front of him. Samuel Winters got up from the chair beneath the wall of sophisticated technology and came forward, his hand extended.

'It's been too long, MJ—may I call you that?' said the world renowned historian. 'As I recall, everyone called you MJ.'

'Certainly, Dr Winters.' They shook hands and the septuagenarian scholar waved his arm, encompassing the room.

'I wanted you to see it all. To know that we have our fingers on the pulse of the world—but not for personal gain, you must understand that.'

'I do. Who are the others?'

'Please sit down,' said Winters, gesturing at the chair facing his own, on the opposite side of the circular table. 'Take off your coat, by all means. When one reaches my age all the rooms are much too warm.'

'If you don't mind, I'll keep it on. This will not be a long conference.'

'You're certain of that?'

'Very,' replied Payton, sitting down.

'Well,' said Winters softly but emphatically as he went to his chair, 'it's the unusual intellect that chooses its position without regard to the parameters of discussion. And you do have an intellect, MJ.'

'Thank you for your generous, if somewhat condescending, compliment.'

That's rather hostile, isn't it?'

'No more so than your deciding for the country who should run and be elected to national office.'

'He's the right man at the right time for all the right reasons.'

'I couldn't agree with you more. It's the way you did it. When one lets loose a rogue force to achieve an objective, one can't know the consequences.'

'Others do it. They're doing it now.'

'That doesn't give you the right. Expose them, if you can, and with your resources I'm sure you can, but don't imitate them.'

'That's sophistry! We live in an animal world, a politically oriented world dominated by predators!'

'We don't have to become predators to fight them… Exposure, not imitation.'

'By the time the word gets out, by the time even the few understand what's happened, the brutal herds have stampeded, trampling us. They change the rules, alter the laws. They're untouchable.'

'I respectfully disagree, Dr Winters.'

'Look at the Third Reich!'

'Look what happened to it. Look at Runnymede and the Magna Carta, look at the tyrannies of the French Court of Louis the Sixteenth, look at the brutalities of the Czars—for Christ's sake, look at Philadelphia in 1787! The Constitution, Doctor! The people react goddamned quickly to oppression and malfeasance!'