'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
