'There's not a thing we can do, is there?' This one was for the Foleys.
'Not really,' Ed replied. 'I suppose we could get someone over there, maybe fly one of our people up from the Kingdom, but the problem then is, whom does he try to meet? We have no way of knowing who's in command there.'
'If anyone,' Mary Pat added, looking at the marching men. None of them took the lead.
'WHAT DO YOU mean?' the buyer asked.
'You didn't pay me on time,' the dealer explained with a belch after draining his first beer. 'I had another buyer.'
'I was only two days late,' the buyer protested. 'There was an administrative problem getting the funds transferred.'
'You have the money now?'
'Yes!'
'Then I will find you some monkeys.' The dealer lifted his hand, snapped his fingers, and caught the attention of the bar boy. An English planter could not have done it better, in this same bar, fifty years earlier. 'It isn't all that hard, you know. A week? Less?'
'But CDC wants them at once. The aircraft is already on the way.'
'I will do my best. Please explain to your client that if they want their consignment on time, then they should pay their bills on time as well. Thank you,' he added for the bar boy. 'One for my friend, too, if you please.' He could afford that, what with the payment he'd just accepted.
'How long?'
'I told you. A week. Perhaps less.' Why was the chap so excited over a few days?
The buyer had no choice, at least not in Kenya. He decided to drink his beer down and speak of other things. Then he'd make a telephone call to Tanzania. After all, the African green monkey was «abundant» throughout Africa. It wasn't as though there were a shortage of the things, he told himself. Two hours later, he learned something different. There was a shortage, though it would last only a few days, as long as it took for the trappers to find a few more troops of the long-tailed pests.
VASCO HANDLED THE translation in addition to his commentary duties. ' 'Our wise and beloved leader who has given our country so much… '
'Like population control the hard way,' Ed Foley snorted.
The soldiers, all guardsmen, moved the coffin into the prepared tomb, and with that, two decades of Iraqi history passed into the books. More likely a loose-leaf binder, Ryan thought. The big question was, who would write the next chapter?
15 DELIVERIES
'SO?' PRESIDENT RYAN asked, after dismissing his latest set of guests.
'The letter, if there ever was one, is missing, sir,' Inspector O'Day replied. 'The most important bit of information developed to the moment is that Secretary Hanson wasn't all that scrupulous in his document-security procedures. That comes from the State's security chief. He says he counseled the Secretary on several occasions. The people I took over with me are interviewing various people to determine who went in and out of the office. It will go on from there.'
'Who's running it?' Ryan remembered that Hanson, good diplomatic technician though he might have been, had never listened all that well to anybody.
'Mr. Murray had designated OPR to continue the investigation independently of his office. That means I'm out, too, because I have reported directly to you in the past. This will be my last direct involvement with the case.'
'Strictly by the book?'
'Mr. President, it has to be that way,' the inspector said with a nod. 'They'll have additional help from the Legal Counsel Division. Those are agents with law degrees who act as in-house legal beagles. They're good troops.' O'Day thought for a moment. 'Who's been in and out of the Vice President's office?'
'Here, you mean?'
'Yes, sir.'
Andrea Price answered that one: 'Nobody lately. It's been unused since he left. His secretary went with him and—'
'You might want to have someone check the typewriter. If it uses a carbon-tape ribbon—'
'Right!' She almost moved right out of the Oval Office. 'Wait. Have your people—'
'I'll make the call,' O'Day assured her. 'Sorry, Mr. President. I should have thought of that sooner. Please seal the office for us?'
'Done,' Price assured him.
THE NOISE WAS unbearable. The monkeys were social animals, who customarily lived in «troops» of up to eighty individuals that populated mainly the margins of forests.on the edge of the broad savannas, the easier to come down from their trees and raid the surrounding open land for food. They had learned in the past hundred years to raid farms, which was easier and safer than what Nature had programmed into their behavior, because the humans who operated the farms typically controlled the predators which ate the monkeys. An African green was a tasty morsel for a leopard or hyena, but so was a calf, and farmers had to protect those. What resulted was a curious bit of ecological chaos. To protect livestock, the farmers, legally or not, eliminated the predators. That allowed the monkey population to expand rapidly, and the hungry African greens would then attack the cereal and other crops which fed both the farmers and their livestock. As a complication, the monkeys also ate insects which preyed on the crops as well, leading local ecologists to suggest that eliminating the monkeys was bad for the ecology. For the farmers it was much simpler. If it ate their livestock, it was killed. If it ate their crops, it was killed also. Bugs might not be large enough to see, but monkeys were, and so few farmers objected when the trappers came.
Of the family cercopithecus, the African green has yellow whiskers and a gold-green back. It can live to thirty years of age—more likely in comfortable captivity than in the predator-infested wild—and has a lively social life. The troops are made of female families, with male monkeys joining the troops individually for periods of a few weeks or months before moving on. An abundance of females in mating season allows a number of males cooperatively to enjoy the situation, but that was not the case in the aircraft. Rather, the cages were stacked like a truck-load of chicken coops on the way to market. Some females were in season but totally inaccessible, frustrating the would-be suitors. Males stacked next to the cages of other males hissed, clawed, and spat at their unwilling neighbors, all the more unhappy that their captors had not noted the simple fact that same-sized cages were used to imprison different-sized monkeys—the male African green is fully double the size of the female—and cramping males who could smell that most welcome of natural signals, so near and yet so far. Added to the unfamiliar smells of the aircraft and the absence of food and water, the crowding caused nothing short of a simian riot, and since the issue could not be resolved by combat, all that resulted was a collective screech of rage from hundreds of individuals which far outstripped the sound of the JT-8 engines driving the aircraft east over the Indian Ocean.
Forward, the flight crew had their cabin door firmly shut and their headphones clamped tightly over their ears. That attenuated the sound, but not the fetid smell which the aircraft's recirculation systems cycled back and forth, both further enraging the cargo and sickening the crew.
The pilot, normally an eloquent man with his invective, had run out of curses and had tired of entreating Allah to expunge these horrid little creatures from the face of the earth. In a zoo, perhaps, he would have pointed to the long-tailed creatures, and his twin sons would have smiled and perhaps tossed some peanuts to their amusing captives. No more. With his tolerance gone, the pilot reached for the emergency oxygen mask and switched the flow on, wishing then he might blow open the cargo doors, de-pressurize the aircraft and thus both extinguish the monkeys and vent the dreadful smell. He would have felt better had he known what the monkeys knew. Something evil was afoot for them.
BADRAYN MET THEM again in a communications bunker. It didn't give him the sense of security that all the massed concrete might have. The only reason this one still stood was that it was concealed under the falsework of an industrial building—a bookbindery, in fact, which actually turned out a few books. This one and a handful of
