do… it's why I asked you to fly out here.'
'I think I know one of the things you're going to tell me,' said Kendrick, sitting down. 'Ardis Montreaux, the widow Vanvlanderen. I heard it on the radio; they say she committed suicide.'
'She did that when she married her late husband.'
'You came to see her, didn't you?'
'Yes.' Rashad nodded as she sat down at the table. 'You'll hear and read everything. There are tapes and transcripts of all of it; they were delivered to me an hour ago.'
'What about Cyprus?'
'The order came from here. A man named Grinell.'
'Never heard of him.'
'Few people have… Evan, it's worse than anything we could imagine.'
'You learned that from Ardis?… Yes, she was Ardis and I was Evan.'
'I know that. No, not from her; with her we only glimpsed the outline and that was frightening enough. Our main source is a man who was killed last night out by the airport.'
'For God's sake, who?'
'The blond European, darling.'
'What?' Kendrick fell back in the seat, his face flushed.
'He taped not only my interview but a subsequent conversation that blew the lid off the top. Except for Grinell we don't have names, but we can piece together a picture, like in a puzzle with blurred figures, and it's terrifying.'
'A government within the government,' said Evan quietly. 'Those were Manny's words. “The servants running the master's house.”'
'As usual, Manny's right.'
Kendrick got up from the chair and walked to a window, leaning against the sill and staring outside. 'The blond man, who was he?'
'We never learned, but whoever he was he died delivering us the information.'
'The Oman file. How did he get it?'
'He wouldn't tell me except to say that his source was a good person who supported you for higher political office.'
'That doesn't tell me anything!' shouted Evan, whipping around from the window. 'There has to be more!'
'There isn't.'
'Did he have any idea what they've done? The lives that were lost, the butchering!'
'He said he'd grieve over the errors of judgment more than anyone else. He didn't know that his grief would only last a couple of hours.'
'Goddamn it!' roared Kendrick at the walls of the room. 'What about this Grinell? Have they got him?'
'He's disappeared. His plane left San Diego for Tucson, Arizona. No one knew about it until morning. It was on the ground for about an hour then took off without filing a flight plan, that's how we found out.'
'Planes can collide that way.'
'Not if they patch into Mexican air traffic across the border.
MJ has an idea that Grinell's security may have spotted the federal vehicles waiting for him near his house in Lajolla.'
Evan returned to the table and sat down, a man exhausted, beaten. 'Where do we go from here?'
'Downstairs to the Vanvlanderen suite. Our European wanted you to look at something—photographs, actually. I don't know why, but he said the man was a Saudi and you might remember. Something about millions and an escape. We've secured the apartment. No one goes in or out under the national security statutes insofar as she was Bollinger's chief of staff and there could be confidential papers.'
'All right, let's go.'
