Ludlum, Robert - The Icarus Agenda

'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 Sanjacinto 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-defence 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 there out of 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 audibly, nodding. '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 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 maniacs 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 gave him a photograph of a fine new fishing boat, along with its ownership papers, a prepaid course for his captain's licence, a bank book 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 was 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 the 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 big cars 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 favourite 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.