across the roadway and Branson spared him neither a word nor a glance, behaviour uncharacteristic of Branson who was much given to directing penetrating glances at everyone, usually for no reason whatsoever. Revson looked after him in some puzzlement, then strolled off towards the ambulance.
Revson said: 'You just been put through the grinder, too?'
'That you can say again.' O'Hare spoke with some feeling. 'You, too?'
'Not me. I've been searched so often that nobody would bother. Everybody else was, though. It must have been pretty thorough. I heard more than one ladylike scream of protest.' He looked after the departing Branson. 'Our mastermind seems unusually preoccupied.'
'He was acting a bit oddly when he left'
'He drew a blank, obviously.'
'Yes.'
'Didn't even investigate your one sealed container — the cardiac unit?'
'That's when he started behaving oddly. I'm pretty sure that he was about to break the seal when I pointed out that that would de-sterilize the equipment and render it useless. I also pointed out that I considered the President a prime candidate for a heart attack and that I regarded him as being the prime cause for this. That was when he backed off.'
'Understandable, I would have thought. He doesn't want to lose his principal hostage.'
'That wasn't the impression he gave me. He also said another funny thing when he left, that he'd never been responsible for anyone's death in his life.'
'To the best of my knowledge that's true. Maybe he just didn't want to spoil his good record.'
'Could have been, could have been.' But the puzzled expression was still on O'Hare's face.
Van Effen regarded Branson with a curiosity that his face didn't register. Branson, he thought, was a shade less than his old ebullient self. Van Effen said: 'Well, how did you find the ambulance and the good doctor? Clean?'
'The ambulance is. God damn it all, I quite forgot to go over O'Hare.'
Van Effen smiled. 'One tends to. Pillars of moral rectitude. I'll go look at him.'
'How did it go with you?'
'There were ten of us and we were pretty thorough — and pretty thoroughly unpopular. If there was a silver dollar on the Golden Gate Bridge we'd have found it We didn't find any silver dollars.'
But then Branson and his men had been searching the wrong places and the wrong people. They should have searched Chief of Police Hendrix before he'd been allowed to leave the bridge.
Hagenbach, Milton, Quarry, Newson and Carter were seated round the long oblong table in the communications wagon. There were bottles of liquor on a wall-mounted sideboard and, judging from the levels of the liquids in the bottles and the glasses in front of the five men, they weren't there for purely decorative purposes. The five appeared to be concentrating on two things only: not speaking to one another and not looking at one another. The bottoms of their glasses appeared to hold a singular fascination for them: comparatively, the average funeral parlour could have qualified as an amusement arcade.
A bell rang softly at the inner end of the wagon. A shirt-sleeved policeman, seated before a battery of telephones, lifted one and spoke softly into it. He turned and said: 'Mr Quarry, sir. Washington.'
Quarry rose to his feet with the alacrity of a French aristocrat going to the guillotine and made his way to the communications desk. His end of the conversation appeared to consist of a series of dispirited grunts. Finally he said, 'Yes, as planned,' returned to the table and slumped into his chair. 'The money has been arranged just in case it's needed.'
Milton said heavily: 'Can you see it not being needed?'
'The Treasury also agrees that we should stall them for up to twenty-four hours from noon tomorrow.'
Milton's lugubriousness didn't alter. 'By Branson's escalation demands that means close on another fifty million dollars.'
'Peanuts to what he's asking.' Milton made a still-born attempt to smile. 'Might give one of our brilliant minds time to come up with a brilliant idea.' He relapsed into a silence which no one seemed inclined to break. Hagenbach reached for a bottle of scotch, helped himself and passed the bottle around. They resumed their mournful inspection of the depth of their glasses.
The bottle was not long left undisturbed. Richards and Hendrix entered and, without speaking, sat down heavily in two vacant chairs. The Vice-President's hand reached the bottle just fractionally before that of Hendrix.
Richards said: 'How did we look on TV tonight?'
'God-damned awful. But no more awful than the seven of us sitting around here without a single idea in our heads.' Milton sighed. 'Seven of the allegedly best governmental and law enforcement minds in the business. The best we can do is drink scotch. Not a single idea among us.'
Hendrix said: 'I think perhaps Revson has.' He fished a piece of paper from the inside of a sock and handed it to Hagenbach. 'For you.'
Hagenbach unfolded the note, cursed and shouted to the operator.
'My decoder. Quick.' Hagenbach was back in business and, predictably, he turned to Hendrix: he wouldn't have asked Richards for the time of day. 'How are things out there? Anything we don't know? How come Hansen died?'
'To put it brutally, hunger, greed. Seemingly he snitched one of the food trays before he could be warned which were the dangerous ones and how they could be identified.'
Milton sighed. 'He always was a voracious eater. Compulsive, you might say. Something wrong with his metabolic system, I suppose. Speak no ill of the dead but I often told him that he was digging his grave with his own teeth. Looks like that's what happened.'
'No fault of Revson's?'
'None in the world. But there's worse. Your man Revson is under heavy suspicion. Branson, as we all have cause to know, is a very very clever man and he's convinced there's an infiltrator in their midst. He's also almost equally convinced that it's Revson. I think the man is working on sheer instinct. He can't pin a thing on Revson.'
'Who's also a very very clever man.' Hagenbach paused then looked sharply at Hendrix. 'If Branson is so suspicious of Revson would he let him get within a mile of you, knowing that you were going ashore?'
'Revson didn't come anywhere near me. General Cartland gave me the message. Revson gave the message to Cartland.'
'So Cartland is in on this?'
'He knows as much about it as we do. Revson is going to give him the cyanide pistol. Never thought our Chief of Staff was so positively blood-thirsty. He seems actually to be looking forward to using it.'
Carter said: 'You know Cartland's reputation as a tank commander in the Second World War. After all the comparatively decent Italians and Germans he disposed of then, do you think he's going to worry about doing away with a few really bad hats'
'You should know. Anyway, I went into one of their awful rest rooms and shoved the note down my sock. I suspected that the Vice-President here and I might be searched before we left the bridge. We weren't. Your Revson is right. Branson is both over-confident and under-conscious of security precautions.'
Revson and O'Hare watched Van Effen walk away. Revson himself walked away a few steps, indicating that O'Hare should follow him. Revson said: 'Well that was a pretty thorough going-over our friend gave you. I don't think he much appreciated your remark about your hoping that he would he a patient of yours some day.'
O'Hare looked up at the darkly threatening sky, now almost directly overhead. The wind was freshening and, two hundred feet below, the white horses were showing in the Golden Gate.
O'Hare said: 'Looks like a rough night coming up. We'd be more comfortable inside the ambulance, I think, and I've some excellent whisky and brandy in there. Used, you understand, solely for the resuscitation of the sick and ailing.'
'You're going to go far in your profession. Sick and ailing describes my symptoms precisely. But I'd rather be
