purge his mind and lungs of the foul poisons already ingested.
He felt safe in this city, as long as he was in his limousine.
It was the finest, most impregnable high-tech device on wheels this side of a tank. A bomb could go off in the glove box, and in the back seat Sir Geoffrey would still be safe as a babe in his mum's arms.
They stalled in traffic on Forty-second Street. They were parked there, amid a thousand honking wog horns, when the car suddenly hit a bump in the road.
Rather strange, that, Sir Geoffrey thought. How does one hit a pothole when one is parked?
The car rocked as if it had been hit by mortar fire.
Sir Geoffrey was thrown roughly around the back seat 'Good heavens, Parkinson, what was that?'
'I'm not certain, sir.'
Sir Geoffrey quickly assessed the situation and employed his great British intellect. 'Well, steer around it, then.'
'Very good, sir.'
The car hopped again.
Parkinson looked genuinely shaken. 'This is very confusing, sir. We're not moving. And I didn't seem to see any holes in the road.'
Parkinson waited for a response. Sir Geoffrey said not a word.
That was odd. His master generally took a rogue pothole as an opportunity to deride the Americans for their shabby, woglike approach to civil problems.
And, Parkinson noticed, the traffic sounds were suddenly much louder than they had been. Almost as if something was open to the street.
But, of course, Sir Geoffrey would never open a window. He thought the smells of New York City were at least as bad as the rank aromas of his fellow UN delegates.
Must be his hearing. Parkinson made a note to go to a doctor to have his ears checked as soon as possible. And anyway, the traffic had thinned by this time. They were able to move on.
The limo continued driving along Forty-second, both rear doors missing.
The spacious, fragrant back interior of the vehicle was as exposed as a Buckingham Palace scandal.
The back seat where British ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Hyde-Black, had sat was empty.
Arkady Rokossovsky was a pirate.
He wasn't the old-fashioned kind of pirate. He had sailed on actual water precisely one time in his life.
It was a pleasure boat in the Black Sea, and Arkady had thrown up, feeding the fishes with his half-digested lunch.
No, he wasn't a pirate of the seas, but rather a pirate of technology.
Arkady taped movies illegally. It was a process that, to most Americans, was half hobby, half nui-sance. To Arkady, it was a living.
The films he taped he sold to his fellow countrymen on his return trips to Moscow. It was quite a successful venture. Movies cost nothing to rent here, so his only real investment was in his two videotape machines. Back home, the tape machines cost a fortune, but those who could afford them could afford to pay top dollar for such great American classics as Ghoulies and Porky's Revenge.
Arkady made a pretty good buck off of video pi-racy. It helped supplement his income as Russian ambassador to the United Nations.
In Russia, nothing official paid very well these days. Government service was no longer the easiest way to a posh Moscow apartment, a weekend dacha or a ZIL limousine.
Fortunately America was still the land of opportunity for enterprising Russians. Those lucky enough to be posted at the UN mission had far greater purchasing power than their countrymen back home.
And the diplomatic pouch meant that they could cart back duty-free loads of blue jeans, American cigarettes and Mars candy bars. A small payment to the customs officers, a portion to the Moscow police, a stipend to the black market, a cut to select individuals in the foreign-service office, and the rest went to the lucky entrepreneur.
Arkady Rokossovsky felt like a millionaire.
He was pleased when the General Assembly had suspended debate on the Lobynian sanctions. He would be returning to Moscow in another week and he wanted to make certain he brought along with him as many tapes as he could carry.
He left the video store with two full bags.
Arkady balanced the bags in one hand as he searched through his pockets for his car keys. In the days of the old Soviet empire, he would have had his own personal driver, but these days everything was on a much tighter budget Sometimes he missed the old days.
He was almost at the car when he began to get the feeling he was being watched. It was an odd sensation. One that he hadn't felt in some time.
He had been part of the mission in the old days, back when nearly all of the Soviet diplomatic corps was KGB. In fact, when he first saw the FBI warning at the beginning of a videotaped movie, he thought that the American federal police agency had somehow found a way to watch him through his television set. His belief in an omnipresent state was that in-grained.
But this was different than KGB surveillance.
There was a strange thrill of electricity around him.
The very air seemed charged.
He was at his car. Arkady, fumbling now, placed his key in the driver's-side door lock.
The pressure around the Russian ambassador suddenly changed. Arkady thought he saw something move out of the corner of his eye.
For an instant, he swore he saw a bony hand with long, tapered fingernails flash before his field of vision. Then he saw nothing.
Secretary of State Helena Eckert passed her doorman at the Brewster Building on Park Avenue.
Since her appointment to State, she spent very little time here. It was good to be home.
The doorman politely touched the brim of his cap as he held the door open wide. She didn't even acknowledge his presence, pretending instead that the door had mysteriously opened of its own volition.
She was a matronly sixty-year-old woman who used too much makeup and spent too little time applying it. Her lips were smeared with sorry streaks of red, her cheeks caked with blotches of orange rouge and her forehead daubed with bits of shimmery blue where an overzealous application of eyeliner had spilled over. Her hair, tinged blue, looked as though it had been styled at Bellevue.
Helena Eckert didn't care. She prided herself on her ability to apply her own makeup. She never let the servants go near her rapidly aging face. As for her hair? Curlers. It had shocked a lot of people when she first revealed the truth to the New Yorker magazine.
She felt so...so bohemian.
Not that she couldn't afford the best hair and face consultants in the world. Helena Eckert was rich.
But she didn't want anyone to hold that against her. Public perception was so important among the lower orders.
Even after she had graduated from ambassador, she had refused to change her grooming habits. Even after the President himself had weighed in on the subject.
But none of that mattered for now. The Lobynian sanctions had brought her back to her old haunts. She was 'ambassador' again. If only temporarily. She insisted while she was in New York that she be addressed as such.
Today, she wore a Perry Ellis raincoat over her Christian Dior blouse and skirt. She felt this proved she had the common touch.
After all, if she wasn't of the people, she never would have been caught dead wearing those rags.
The foyer to her apartment building was merci-fully empty and Acting Ambassador Eckert rode up to her penthouse apartment in peace and quiet. Quiet was important to her after the morning she'd spent.
She was a diplomat even though there were those who said behind her back that Helena Eckert wasn't very diplomatic.
