'There's none better, Manny.'
'Maybe he should run the Agency.'
'No, he hates administrative work and he's a terrible politician. If he doesn't like someone or something, everybody knows it. He's better off where he is.'
The sound of the front door opening and closing had an immediate effect on Weingrass. 'Oy!' he cried, shoving his cigarette into the startled Khalehla's mouth and blowing away the smoke above him, waving his hands to move the incriminating evidence towards Rashad. 'Naughty sheiks!' he whispered. 'Smoking in my presence!'
'Impossible,' said Khalehla softly, removing the cigarette and crushing it in an ashtray as Kendrick walked through the living room and on to the porch.
'She'd never smoke that close to you,' admonished Evan, dressed in a blue sweat suit, perspiration rolling down his face.
'Now you've got the ears of a Dobermann?'
'And you've got the brains of a hooked snapper.'
'Very smart fish.'
'Sorry,' said Rashad calmly. 'He can be terribly demanding.'
‘Tell me about it.'
'What did I just say?' shouted Weingrass. 'He says that all the time. It's the sign of a highly developed, misplaced superiority complex and very irritating to really superior intellects… Have a good workout, dummy?'
Kendrick smiled and walked to the bar where there was a jug of orange juice. 'I'm up to thirty minutes, fast pace,' he answered, pouring himself a glass of juice.
'That's very nice if you're a cowboy's horse on a roundup.'
'He says things like that all the time,' protested Kendrick. 'It's aggravating.'
'Tell me about it,' Khalehla replied, drinking her coffee.
'Any calls?' asked Evan.
'It's barely past seven, darling.'
'Not in Zurich. It's past one in the afternoon over there. I was talking to them before I went out.'
'Talking to whom?' asked Rashad.
'Mainly to the director of the Gemeinschaft Bank. Mitch scared his bladder dry with the information we have and he's trying to co-operate… Wait a minute. Did anyone check the telex in the study?'
'No, but I heard the damn thing clacking away about twenty minutes ago,' said Weingrass.
Kendrick put down his glass, turned and walked rapidly out of the porch and across the living room to a door beyond the stone hallway. Khalehla and Manny watched him, then looked at each other and shrugged. Within moments the congressman returned, gripping a telex sheet in his hand, his expression conveying his excitement. 'They did it!' he exclaimed.
'Who did what?' asked Weingrass.
'The bank. You remember the fifty million line of credit Grinell and his consortium of thieves in California set up for my buy-out?'
'My God,' exclaimed Khalehla. 'They couldn't have left it standing!'
'Of course not. It was cancelled the moment Grinell got off the island.'
'So?' said Manny.
'In this age of complicated telecommunications, computer errors crop up now and then and a beaut was just made. There's no record of the cancellation having been received. The credit's on! only it's been transferred to a sister bank in Bern with a new, coded account number. It's all there.'
'They'll never pay!' Weingrass was emphatic.
'It'll be charged against their reserves, which are ten times fifty million.'
'They'll fight it, Evan,' insisted Khalehla, as
