Survival... ZERO!

'Unwind, will you buddy? Can't I talk to you any more?'

For a long few seconds he studied my face, then let a smile crack the corners of his mouth. 'Sorry, Mike. I guess I got too much bugging me. There's more than one meeting going on in there.'

'So the Soviets really are cooperating on that C.B. deal?'

'You called it. And they're scared stiff. All the top brass from Fort Derrick arrived at seven with a limousine of Russkies straight off a chartered nonstop plane from Moscow right behind them.'

'Military types?'

'Hardly. Some were too old for that.'

'Specialists in chemical-biological warfare,' I suggested.

'Could be.'

'Any newspapers covering it?'

'Only the social end. They missed the first batch. That's why you spook me. Nothing better interrupt that meeting.'

'Quit worrying about me. Anything turn up yet?'

'One lonely probability. A couple on a honeymoon camping trip spotted a guy wandering around the Ashokan watershed area. He seemed to be sick ... kind of stumbling, fell a couple of times. They were going to go over to him but he wandered up to the road and must have thumbed a ride. The rough description they gave was similar to the guy we found in the subway.'

'The Guard in the area?'

'Like a blanket. Boats, divers, foot by foot search. They cut off the water flow from that district and that they can't keep a secret, so they'd better come up with some imaginative excuse before morning.'

'Oh, they will,' I said casually.

Pat jammed his hands back into his pockets and grimaced in my direction. 'They better do better than that. Right now you can realize what it's like to be in death row with no reprieve in sight.'

'Yeah, great,' I said. 'By the way, you ever get tipped to a pickpocket who works in a red vest?'

'Go screw your pickpocket in a red vest,' Pat said sourly. He waved an okay sign to the two cops and headed back toward his car.

The ramrod-stiff butler with the bristly gray hair scrutinized the admission card, verified Renee with an inaudible phone call and apparently described me after giving my name. The reply was favorable, because he took our wet clothes, hung them in a closet in the small foyer and led us to the office door in the rear. Unlike my coat, his hadn't been tailored to conceal a heavy gun and it bulged over his left hip. For him, butlering was a secondary sideline. He had been plucked right off an army parade ground.

William Dorn introduced me to the five of them as a friend of his, his eyes twinkling with amusement. They all gave me a solemn handshake, the one-jerk European variety with accented 'How-do-you-do's' except Teddy Fin- lay. He waited until Dorn and Renee were exchanging papers and the others talking animatedly over drinks, then pulled me aside to the wall bar and poured a couple of highballs.

He handed me one, let me taste it, then: 'How long have you been a 'friend' of William, Mike?' He laid it heavy on 'friend' so I'd know he made me.

'Not long,' I said.

'Isn't being here an imposition?'

'Why should it bother you? The State Department doesn't work on my level.'

'Mr. Robert Crane is my superior. It seems that you were trying to work on his. Nobody is pleased having you know what we do.'

'Tough titty, feller. Crane didn't like it because I wouldn't take his crap. I won't take yours either, so knock it off.'

'You still didn't answer my question.' There was a hard edge in his voice.

'I have a contract to bump the Russian Ambassador. That sound like reason enough?'

'One phone call and you can be where Eddie Dandy is, Mr. Hammer.'

I took another pull of my drink, not letting him see how tight my fingers were around the glass. 'Oh? Where's that?'

'On vacation ... in protective custody. He was getting a little unruly too.'

When I finished the drink I put the glass back on the bar and turned around to face him, the words coming quietly from between my teeth. 'Try it, stupid. I'll blast a couple of .45's into the ceiling and bring every damn cop and reporter around in this joint. Then just for fun I'll run off nice and fat at the mouth and really start that panic you're working your ass off to avoid. That loud and clear?'

Finlay didn't answer me. He just stood there with white lines showing around his mouth and his forehead curled in an angry frown. Two of the Czech representatives had been looking curiously in our direction, but when I turned, faking a smile, they stopped watching and went back to their conversation. Dorn and Renee had finished their business and were laughing at some remark Josef Kudak had made and waved me over to join them. Kudak was the new member of the Soviet satellite team, but it was evident that the three of them were old friends despite political differences.

'Good joke?' I asked.

William Dorn chuckled and held a match to a long, thin cigar. 'My friend Josef thinks I'm a filthy rich, decadent capitalist and wants to know how he can get that way too.'

'Tell him?'

'Certainly not. I bought him out for three million dollars and I'd wager he hasn't spent a penny of it yet.'

'You don't know my wife or our tax structure, friend William,' the Czech said. He was a small, pudgy man with a wide Slavic face and bright blue eyes. 'Between them they have reduced me to poverty.'

'There are no poor politicians,' I put in.

Renee looked startled, but Dorn laughed again and Kudak's face widened in a broad smile. 'Ah,' he said, 'at last a candid man. You are right, Mr. Hammer. It is all a very profitable business, no? Should it be otherwise? Money belongs to those who can get it.'

'Or take it,' I said.

'Certainly, otherwise it would rot. The peasants put their gold into little jars and bury it. They die of old age without revealing where they have hidden it, so afraid are they of having it stolen. With it they buy nothing, do nothing. It is for the businessmen, the politicians to see that money is kept circulating.'

It was hard to tell if he was joking or serious, so I just grinned back and lit up a smoke. 'I wish some of it would circulate my way.'

Kudak's eyebrows went up a little in surprise. 'You are not a politician?'

'Nor a good businessman,' I added.

'But you must have a profitable specialty ...' He looked from me to Dorn and back again.

'Sometimes I kill people,' I said.

Dorn let out a long laugh at the expression on Kudak's face and the way Renee grabbed me to make a hurried exit after a quick handshake with everybody I'd met. When she got me outside in the rain she popped her

umbrella open with typical feminine pique and said, 'Men. They're all crazy!' She stretched her arm up so I could get in beside her. 'What a thing to say to a man in high office. Doesn't anything ever embarrass you?'

'Wait till he finds out it's true,' I said.

'I'll never take you with me again.'

'Never?'

'Well, at least not where there's people. Now, where are we off to?'

I looked at my watch. It was twenty after eleven and raining. Inside the main building the reception was going full force and the sound of a string quartet was almost drowned out by the steady hum of voices. On the street at least fifty uniformed cops stood uncomfortably in assigned positions waiting for their shift to end. Pat's car was gone, but the pair of harness bulls still stood at the fenced entrance. It was the kind of night when New York slept for a change. At least those who knew nothing of the man in the subway.

And maybe the guy in the red vest.