Extraordinary Powers

SIXTY-FOUR

So what do you say at such a moment?

For what seemed an eternity, no one spoke.

The lake was still, the water glassy and opaque. There was no buzz of motorboats, no shouts, not even the call of birds. Absolute silence. The world stood still.

Weeping, Molly squeezed her arms around her father’s chest hard enough, it seemed, to crush him. She is tall, but he is taller still, and so he had to hunch forward to allow the two of them to hug.

I watched in dull shock.

Finally, I said: “I barely recognized you with the beard.”

“Isn’t that the point?” Harrison Sinclair said solemnly, his voice raspy. Then he cracked a wrinkled, lopsided smile. “I assume you made sure you weren’t followed here.”

“Best I could.”

“I knew I could count on you.”

Suddenly Molly broke her embrace, drew back, and slapped her father across the face. He winced.

“Damn you,” she said, her voice breaking.

The lodge was dark and still. It had the distinctive odor of a house that has long been closed up: of countless crackling fires over the years that have permeated the floors and walls; of camphor and mothballs; of mildew and paint and rancid cooking oil.

We sat together on a love seat whose muslin upholstery was discolored with years of dust, watching her father as he spoke. He sat in a canvas chair that was suspended from the high ceiling on a cable.

He had changed into a pair of baggy khaki shorts and a loose navy blue pullover sweater. With his legs sprawled in front of him, casually crossed at the ankles, he looked as relaxed as could be, the amiable host settling down for a martini with his weekend houseguests.

Sinclair’s beard was full and untrimmed; it appeared to be the result of several months’ growth, which made perfect sense. He had gotten a lot of sun, probably swimming and boating on the lake, and his face looked tough and leathery, the skin of an old mariner.

“I had a feeling you’d find me here,” he said. “But not this quickly. Then Pierre La Fontaine called me a few hours ago and told me a couple had been asking questions in St.-Jerome about me and the house.”

Molly looked baffled, so he explained: “Pierre’s the keeper of the records, the mayor of Lac Tremblant, the chief of police, and the general chief factotum. He’s also the caretaker for a number of summer residents. An old and trusted friend of mine. He’s looked after this house for quite some time now-years, in fact. Back in the fifties he arranged the sale of this place-quite cleverly, I must say-so that it passed out of Grandma Hale’s hands and basically disappeared, its ownership tangled and impossible to trace.

“Wasn’t my idea, by the way. It was Jim Angleton’s. Back when I began to get involved with covert stuff, Jim felt strongly I should always have a place to disappear to if things ever got too hot. Canada seemed to make as good sense as any place, since it’s outside of U.S. borders. Anyway, Pierre rented it out during the summers occasionally, more often during ski season. And always on behalf of a fictional Canadian investor named Strombolian. The rental income more than paid for the upkeep and his fee. The rest Pierre kept in trust.” He gave his crinkled smile again. “He’s an honest guy.”

Without warning, Molly erupted in anger. She had been sitting next to me in silence, contemplatively I thought, no doubt in an advanced state of shock. But as it turned out, she had been smoldering, seething.

“How… could… you do this to me? How could you put me through this?”

“Snoops-” her father began.

“Goddammit! Have you any idea-”

“Molly!” he shouted hoarsely. “Hold on! I didn’t have a choice, don’t you see that?” He drew in his lanky legs until he was sitting upright, then hunched forward toward his daughter, his eyes beseeching, glistening.

“When they killed my dear Sheila, my love-yes, Molly, we were lovers, but I’m sure you knew that-I realized it was only a matter of hours before they got to me. I knew I had to hide.”

“From the Wise Men,” I said. “From Truslow and Toby-”

“And half a dozen others. And their security forces, which aren’t exactly small-time.”

I said: “This all concerns what’s happening in Germany, isn’t that right?”

“It’s complicated, Ben. I don’t really have-”

“I knew you were alive,” Molly interrupted. “I’ve known it since Paris.”

There was something steely in her tone, a quiet assurance, and I turned to look at her.

“It was his letter,” she continued, looking at me. “He mentioned an emergency appendectomy that forced him to spend an entire summer with us here, at Lac Tremblant.”

“And?” I prompted her.

“And-it sounds trivial now, but I didn’t remember seeing an appendix scar. The face was pretty much destroyed, but the body wasn’t, and I guess I would have remembered, would have registered it on some subconscious level. I mean, it might have been there, but I wasn’t certain. You understand? And you remember I tried to get the autopsy a while back, but it was sealed? Order of the Fairfax County district attorney. So I pulled some strings.”

“Which is why you wanted the fax machine in Paris,” I said. At the time, she had told me only that she had a thought about her father’s murder, an idea, a way to prove something.

She nodded “Every pathologist-at least, every pathologist I know-keeps a copy of his work in his own locked drawers. You do that in case you ever run into trouble later on, so you can turn to your notes and all that. So I’m not without resources. I called a friend at Mass. General, a pathologist, who called a colleague at Sibley in Washington, where the autopsy was done. Routine inquiry, right? Bureaucratic? It’s incredibly easy to circumvent security channels in a hospital if you know where to pull the strings.”

“And?” I prompted her again.

“I had the autopsy report faxed to me. And sure enough, it listed the presence of an appendix. And at that point I knew that wherever Dad was, it wasn’t beneath that gravestone in Columbia County in upstate New York.” She turned back to her father. “So whose body was it?”

“No one who’ll be missed,” he replied. “I’m not without my own resources.” Then he added, quietly: “It’s a lousy business.”

“My God,” Molly said under her breath, her head bowed.

“Not quite as evil as you must be thinking,” he said. “A fairly thorough sweep of John Does-unidentified cadavers in hospital morgues-netted us someone of approximately the right build, age, and-toughest of all-good health. Most homeless people are afflicted with a dozen different ailments.”

Molly nodded, smiled fiercely. Bitterly, she said: “And what’s one less vagrant?”

“The face wasn’t important,” I said, “since it was to be mostly destroyed in the crash anyway, right?”

“Right,” Sinclair replied. “Actually, it was destroyed before the crash, if you must know. The restorative artists at the mortuary, who had no idea they weren’t laboring away on the real Harrison Sinclair, were given my photograph to work from. Whether there’s to be a public viewing or not, they generally like to make the body as presentable as possible.”

“The tattoo on the shoulder,” I said. “The mole on the chin-”

“Easily done.”

Molly had been silently observing this matter-of-fact exchange between her father and her husband, and at this point she began to speak again, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Ah, yes. The body was in terrible shape after the car crash. Plus which some decompositional bloating had set in.”

She nodded, flashed a broad smile that was not pleasant. Her eyes shone with ferocity. “It looked like Dad, sure, but how closely did either of us look, really? How closely could we bear to look at such a time, under such circumstances?” She was staring at me, but at the same time she wasn’t seeing me; she was looking through me. There was something awful in her tone now: a monotone with underpinnings of steel, anger, sarcasm. “They bring you into the morgue, they slide open a drawer and unzip the body bag. You see a face, partially destroyed in an explosion, but you see enough of it to say, yeah, sure, that’s my own father, that’s his nose as far as I can tell, as far as I want to look, that’s part of his mouth, for Christ’s sake! You say to yourself, I’m seeing my own flesh and blood, the man who helped bring me into the world, the guy who gave me piggyback rides, and I never want to remember that I ever saw him this way, but they want me to look, so I’ll give a perfunctory look, there, now take it away!”

Her father had put one hand up to his craggy face. His eyes were sad. He waited, didn’t speak.

I watched my dear Molly, saw she couldn’t go on. She was right, of course. It wasn’t terribly difficult, I knew, using face masks and what is called the “restorative art,” to make a cadaver resemble that of another.

“Brilliant,” I said, genuinely impressed, if still thoroughly befuddled.

“Don’t credit me,” Sinclair said. “The idea came from our old enemies in Moscow. You remember that bizarre case they lecture on during training at the Farm, Ben? About the time in the mid-sixties when the Russians had an open-coffin funeral in Moscow of a high-ranking Red Army intelligence officer?”

I nodded.

But he continued, addressing his daughter. “We sent our spooks ostensibly to pay their respects, but actually to see who turned up at the funeral, take clandestine snapshots, and so on. Apparently this Red Army officer had been a significant American asset for a dozen years.

“And then, eight years later, it turned out that the guy was still alive. The whole thing had been an elaborate Soviet counterintelligence operation, in effect, a sting. Complicated stuff. Evidently they’d made a life mask from the double agent-whom they’d turned into a triple in the meantime-and somehow put it on a corpse they happened to have handy. In those days, the good old Brezhnev years, the top brass thought nothing of having a guy shot if they needed to, so maybe they sent out an order for the body of a guy who looked like the mole, I don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler,” I asked, “to just say you were so badly burned in the crash that nothing was left to identify?”

“Simpler,” Sinclair said, “but in the end riskier. An unidentifiable body raises all manner of suspicions.”

“And the photograph?” Molly asked. “Of you with-your throat slit?”

“These days,” Sinclair said wearily, “even that’s not impossible. A contact who was once affiliated with the Media Lab at MIT-”

“Sure,” I said. “Digital retouching of photographs.”

He nodded; Molly looked puzzled.

I explained: “You remember a couple of years ago when National Geographic ran a photograph on its cover, where they moved the Giza pyramid over a bit so it would fit?”

She shook her head.

“A big controversy in certain circles,” I said. “Anyway, they’re now able to retouch photographs in such a sophisticated way that it’s pretty much undetectable.”

“That’s right,” Sinclair said.

I continued: “So that the focus would be not on whether you’d really been killed, but how.”

“Well,” Molly said to her father, “you fooled me. I thought you’d been murdered, I thought your throat had been slit before the car crash, my own father had been murdered! And here you were all the time, sailing in a lake in Canada.” Her voice grew steadily louder, angrier. “Was that the point? Was the point to make me think you’d been killed? Was the point to do that to your own goddamned daughter?”

“Molly-” her father tried to interject.

“To terrify and traumatize your own daughter? For what?”

“Molly!” he said almost desperately. “Listen to me! Please, hear me out. The point was to save my life.”

He took a deep breath, and then began.

SIXTY-FIVE

The room in which we sat-all picture windows and spare, plain wooden furniture-was steadily darkening as dusk approached. Gradually our eyes became used to the darkness. Sinclair did not get up to switch on lights; neither did we. Instead, we sat, transfixed, watching his shadowed form, listening.

“One of the first things I did after moving into the director’s office, Ben, was to order up from the archives the sealed transcript of your court-martial fifteen years ago. I’d always had my suspicions about it, and even if you wanted to put the whole thing behind you and never hear another word about it, I wanted to know the truth of what happened that day.

“Had this been the bad old days, the matter would have died there. But the Soviet Union had dissolved, and former Soviet agents were suddenly accessible to us. The trial transcript listed the true identity of the fellow who’d tried to defect-Berzin-and through a complicated channel I won’t go into, I managed to contact him.

“Somehow, his own side had learned that he had tried to defect. I assume Toby had informed them. So Berzin was imprisoned-fortunately, they pretty much stopped shooting their own people when Khrushchev came to power-and later released, sent to live in some one-horse town about seventy-five miles north of Moscow.

“Well, the new, post-Soviet government had no interest in him. Therefore, I was able to strike a deal with the guy. I arranged safe passage for him and his wife. In exchange, he gave me the file he’d been trying to sell in Paris-proving that Toby was, or rather, had been, a Soviet asset code-named MAGPIE.”

Molly interrupted, “But what does that mean, a Soviet ‘asset’?”

“MAGPIE was no ideological sympathizer of Communism,” Sinclair explained. “That sort of thing went out in 1956, if not before. Apparently Toby had been caught by a sharp-eyed KGB type embezzling Agency funds. He was given an ultimatum: Either you cooperate with us, or we tell Langley what we know, and face the consequences. Toby chose to cooperate.

“Anyway, this Berzin fellow told me he had a tape of his meeting with you and Toby, and he played it for me. It confirmed everything. You’d been set up. I allowed Berzin to keep the original of the tape-I made a copy-if he would give it directly to you when the time came, when you asked for it.

“I checked, and learned that Toby was not in a sensitive position any longer. He was in charge of certain outside projects that seemed marginal to me-extrasensory perception and the like-and stood no chance of ever coming to fruition.”

“Why didn’t you arrest him?” I asked.

“It would have been a mistake,” Sinclair said, “to arrest him until I had the others. I couldn’t risk alerting them.”

“But if Toby was one of the conspirators,” Molly asked me, “why was he willing to be in such physical proximity to you in Tuscany?”

“Because he knew I was way too drugged to do anything,” I explained.

“What are you talking about?” Sinclair said.

Here Molly turned and gave me a significant glance. I turned away: what was the point of telling him, even if he did believe us?

I said: “Your letter explained about the gold, about how you helped Orlov get it out. Apparently you wrote that letter right after you met with him in Zurich. What happened after that?”

“I knew the appearance of all that gold in Zurich would set off all kinds of alarms,” he said, “but I had no idea what that would mean. I sent Sheila over to meet with Orlov, to conduct a second round of negotiations, make final arrangements. Hours after she returned from Zurich, walking near her apartment in Georgetown, she was killed.

“I was heartbroken and terrified. I knew I had gotten in over my head. And I was sure I’d be next. I was witnessing a war over this gold, probably being waged by the Wise Men. I barely could think-I was in a state of shock, grieving for Sheila.

Although I could barely see Hal’s face, I could see from his silhouette that his face was drawn, though whether from deep concentration or great tension, I couldn’t tell. I focused my mind, trying to pick up any thoughts I could, but there was nothing; he wasn’t close enough.

“And then they came after me. It was a matter of hours after Sheila’s death-two men broke into my house. I was keeping a gun by my bed, naturally, and I killed one of the attackers. The other one-well, it was a standoff. But obviously he didn’t want simply to knock me off; he had more elaborate plans. It had to look like an accident. So he was constrained somewhat.”

“You suborned him,” I said.

Molly said, “What?”

“Correct,” Hal replied. “I suborned him. I struck a deal with him. After all, the head of the CIA has his resources, does he not? In essence, I turned him, exactly as I had been taught to do in my tradecraft-training days. I have my discretionary budgets. I could pay him handsomely-and more important, I could provide him with protection.

“I learned from him that Truslow had sent him to kill me, as he had had Sheila killed. And the gold would be out of my hands, out of American and Russian government hands-and into the hands of the Wise Men. Truslow had already begun his preparations to set me up, having false photos made that showed me in the Cayman Islands, dummied-up computer travel records, and whatnot. He was going to have me killed and then have me take the fall for the missing money.

“I knew then that Truslow was rotten. That he was one of the Wise Men. That he wouldn’t stop until he had gained full possession of the gold. And that I would have to disappear.

“So, I had a photograph created-one that showed me quite convincingly dead. It was all the evidence he needed to take to Truslow to collect his half-million dollars. And once I had ‘died’-once my lookalike had burned in the car crash-he was safe. For him it was a great deal. As it was for me.”

“Where is he?” Molly asked.

“Somewhere in South America, I believe. Probably Ecuador.”

And for the first time, I heard one of Hal’s thoughts, clear as a bell: I had him killed.

By now the pieces had begun to fall into place, and I interrupted Sinclair’s tale.

“What do you know,” I asked, “about a German assassin code-named Max?”

“Describe him.”

I did.

“The Albino,” Sinclair replied immediately. “That’s what we used to call him. Real name is Johannes Hesse. Hesse was the Stasi’s leading wet-work specialist until the day the Berlin Wall came down.”

“And then?”

“Then he disappeared. Somewhere in Catalonia, en route to Burma, where a number of his Stasi comrades had secured refuge. Went private, we figured.”

“Hired by Truslow,” I said. “Another question: You expected the Wise Men to search out the gold?”

“Naturally. I wasn’t disappointed.”

“How-”

He smiled. “I hid the account number in several places, places I knew they’d look. The safes in my office and at home. My executive files. Encrypted, of course.”

“To make it plausible,” I said. “But couldn’t someone clever enough find a way to transfer the money out at a great remove? Undetectably?”

“Not the way the account was set up. Once I-or my legal heirs-accessed the account, it became active, and Truslow could transfer the money. But Truslow would have to go to Zurich personally-and thereby leave his fingerprints.”

“Which is why Truslow needed us to go to Zurich!” I said. “And why-once we’d activated the account-Truslow’s people tried to have me killed. But you must have had a reliable contact in the Bank of Zurich.”

Sinclair nodded wearily. “I need to get to bed. I need my sleep.”

But I continued: “And so you had him. You had his ‘fingerprints,’ as you put it.”

“Why did you leave the photograph for me in Paris?” Molly asked.

“Simple,” her father replied. “If I were tracked down and killed here, I wanted to make sure someone-preferably you-showed up here and found the documents I’ve concealed in the house.”

“So you have the proof?” I asked.

“I have Truslow’s signature. It wasn’t so bold of him-his people were watching Orlov, and as far as he knew, I was dead.”

“The old woman-Berzin’s wife-told me to find Toby. She said he’d cooperate.”

Sinclair had begun to slow down, his eyelids drooping. His head began to nod. “A possibility,” he said. “But Toby Thompson tumbled down a steep flight of stairs at his home two days ago. The report is that his wheelchair caught on a corner of a rug. I seriously doubt it was an accident. But in any case, he’s dead.”

Molly and I were speechless for a good twenty or thirty seconds. I didn’t know what to feel: do you grieve for a man who killed your wife?

Sinclair broke the silence. “I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning with Pierre La Fontaine to make some rather pressing financial arrangements in Montreal.” He smiled. “Incidentally, the Bank of Zurich has no idea how much gold is in the vault. Five billion dollars’ worth was deposited. But a few gold bars are missing-thirty-eight, to be exact.”

“What happened to them?” Molly asked.

“I stole them. Had them removed and sold. At the going gold rate, I netted a little over five million dollars. Given how much gold is in that vault, no one’s going to notice what’s missing. And I think the Russian government owes it to me-to us-as a commission.”

“How could you?” Molly whispered, aghast.

“It’s only a tiny fraction, Snoops. Five million bucks. You’ve always said you wanted to open a clinic for poor kids, right? So here’s the money to do it. Anyway, what’s a paltry five million compared with ten billion, right?”

We were all exhausted, and before long Molly and I had fallen asleep in one of the spare bedrooms. The linen closet held bedsheets that were clean and crisply ironed, if somewhat mildew-smelling.

I lay down beside her for a brief nap, after which I planned to draw up a plan of action for the next day. But instead, I slept for several hours, and I was awakened from a dream that had something vaguely to do with some sort of machinery that thumped rhythmically, like a perpetual-motion machine, and by the time I bolted upright in the moonlight that streamed in through the dusty windows, I knew that my dreams had been shaped by a noise from outside. A noise that began faintly grew steadily louder.

A regular thumping. A whump-whump-whump sound that was somehow familiar.

The sound of chopper blades.

A helicopter.

It sounded as if it had landed somewhere very near. Was there a helicopter pad on the property? I hadn’t seen one. I turned to look out the window, but it faced out onto the lake, and the helicopter sounded as if it were off to one side of the lodge.

Racing out of the bedroom to a window in the hallway, I spied what was unmistakably a helicopter lifting up off a small bluff on the property. It was, I could just barely see, an asphalt-paved helicopter pad, which I hadn’t noticed earlier in the day. Was someone arriving?

Had someone arrived?

Or-and the thought jolted me-had someone just left?

Hal.

Flinging open the door to Hal’s bedroom, I saw that the bed was empty. It was, in fact, made: either he had made it before he left (unlikely) or he hadn’t slept at all (far more likely). Next to his closet was a small, neat pile of clothes, as if he had left in some haste.

He was gone. He had obviously arranged this surreptitious middle-of-the-night departure, deliberately without telling us.

But where had he gone?

I felt someone’s presence in the room. I turned: Molly stood there, rubbing her eyes with one hand, pulling idly at her hair with another.

She said: “Where is he, Ben? Where’d he go?”

“I have no idea.”

“But that was him in the helicopter?”

“I assume so.”

“He said he was going to meet with Pierre La Fontaine.”

“In the middle of the night?” I said, running to the telephone. In a few moments I had Pierre La Fontaine’s telephone number. I dialed it; it rang for a long time before it was answered, by La Fontaine, in a sleepy voice. I handed the phone to Molly.

“I need to talk to my father,” she said.

A pause.

“He said he was meeting you in Montreal later this morning.”

Another pause.

“Oh, God,” she said, and hung up.

“What?” I asked.

“He says he’s supposed to come here to see Hal in three days. They had no plan to meet in Montreal, today or any other day.”

“Why was he lying to us?” I asked.

“Ben!”

Molly held up an envelope addressed to her, which she’d found under the pile of clothes.

Inside was a hastily scrawled note:

Snoops-forgive me and understand please-I couldn’t tell you two-knew you’d try with all your might to stop me, since you’d already lost me once-later you’ll understand-I love you-

Dad

It was Molly who, knowing her father’s idiosyncrasies so well-his scrupulous record keeping-eventually found the thin brown accordion file in a drawer in the room Hal had been using as his study. Among miscellaneous personal documents he’d evidently needed in his seclusion-records of bank accounts, false identity papers, and so on-was a slender sheaf of papers that, taken together, told the entire story:

Apparently, Sinclair had rented a post office box in St.-Agathe under a false name, and in the past two weeks or so he had received a number of documents.

One of them was a photocopied schedule of a public, nationally televised hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The hearing was to take place tonight, in Room 216 of the Hart Office Building, the United States Senate, in Washington.

One item on the schedule was circled in red ink: an appearance at seven this evening-barely fifteen hours from now-by an unspecified “Witness.”

I knew then.

“The surprise witness,” I murmured aloud.

SIXTY-SIX

Molly let out a cry.

“No!” she said. “God, no! He’s-”

“We’ve got to stop him,” I interrupted.

Everything fit together now; everything made terrible sense. Harrison Sinclair-the surprise witness-was the one scheduled to be assassinated. A terrible irony occurred to me: Sinclair, whom we thought we’d buried, was all of a sudden discovered to be alive, and now he would be killed in a matter of hours.

Molly (who must have been struck with this same thought) clasped her hands, held them to her mouth. She bit the knuckle of her index finger, as if to keep from screaming. She began pacing around the study in tight, frantic circles.

“My God,” she whispered. “My God. What can we do?”

I found myself pacing as well. The last thing I wanted to do now was to further terrify Molly. We both needed to remain calm, think clearly.

“Who can we call?” she said.

I kept pacing.

“Washington,” she said. “Someone on the Senate committee.”

I shook my head. “Too dangerous. We don’t know who we can trust.”

“Someone in the Agency-”

“That’s preposterous!”

She resumed chewing on her knuckle. “Someone else, then. A friend. Someone who can show up at the hearing-”

“And do what? Go up against a trained assassin? No; we have to catch up with him.”

“But where?”

I began to think aloud. “There’s no way he’s taking the helicopter to Washington.”

“Why?”

“Too far. Much too far. The helicopter’s way too slow.”

“Montreal.”

“Likely. Not definitely, but I’d calculate that there’s a high probability the helicopter is taking him to Montreal, where he’s either stopping for a while-”

“Or getting onto a plane for Washington. If we check all scheduled flights from Montreal to Washington-”

“Sure,” I said impatiently, “if he’s taking a commercial flight. More likely, he’s chartered a plane.”

“Why? Wouldn’t a commercial flight be safer?”

“Yes, but a private plane is much more flexible and anonymous in its own way. I’d charter a plane. All right. Let’s assume the chopper’s taking him to Montreal.” I looked at my watch. “Probably he’s there by now.”

“But where? Which airport?”

“Montreal’s got Dorval and Mirabel. That’s two airstrips, not to mention any number of small unnamed airstrips between here and Montreal.”

“But there must be a limited number of airplane charter companies listed in Montreal,” Molly said. She pulled a telephone book from the floor, near the couch. “If we call each one-”

“No!” I exclaimed too loudly. “Most of them won’t be answering the phone at this time of night. And who’s to say your father made arrangements with a Canadian charter company? It might have been any of thousands of U.S. companies!”

Molly sank to the couch, her hands flat against her face. “Oh, God, Ben. What can we do?”

I looked at my watch again. “We don’t have a choice,” I said. “We have to get to Washington and stop him there.”

“But we don’t know where he’s going to be in Washington!”

“Sure we do. The Hart Senate Office Building, Room 216, at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings.”

“But before that! We have no idea where he’s going to be before that!”

She was right, of course. The most we could hope to do was to show up at the hearing room and-

And what?

How in the world could we stop her father, protect him?

The solution, I suddenly realized, was in my head. My heart began to pound with excitement and fear.

A few moments before he was so gruesomely killed, Johannes Hesse, alias “Max,” had thought that another assassin would take his place.

I couldn’t stop Harrison Sinclair, but I could stop his assassin.

If anyone could, I could.

“Get dressed,” I said. “I’ve got it figured out.”

It was just after four-thirty in the morning.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Three hours later-at almost seven-thirty on the morning of the last day-our small plane touched down in a small airport in rural Massachusetts. Less than twelve hours remained, and although it was an unbroken stretch of time, I feared (with good reason) that it wouldn’t be enough.

From Lac Tremblant, Molly had contacted a small private airplane charter company called Compagnie Aéronautique Lanier, based in Montreal, which had advertised the availability of twenty-four-hour emergency call service. Her call had been routed to the firm’s on-call pilot and had awakened him. Molly explained that she was a physician who needed to be flown to Montreal’s Dorval Airport on an emergency basis. She furnished the exact map coordinates of her father’s helipad, and a little over an hour later we were picked up in a Bell 206 Jet Ranger.

At Dorval, we had made arrangements with another charter firm to fly us from Montreal to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. Given a choice of planes-a Seneca II, a Commander, a King Air prop jet, or a Citation 501-we chose the Citation, which was by far the fastest, capable of flying at 350 miles per hour. At Dorval, we easily cleared customs: our false American passports (we used Mr. and Mrs. John Brewer, which still left one virgin set if ever we needed to become the Mr. and Mrs. Alan Crowells) were barely inspected, and in any case, once Molly explained that it was a medical emergency, we were rushed through.

At Hanscom we rented a car and I drove the thirty miles or so as quickly as I dared, at precisely the speed limit. Once I had fully explained my plan to Molly, we sat in grim silence. She was terrified, but probably saw no logic in quarreling with me, since she was unable to devise any less risky plan to save her father’s life. I needed to clear my mind as much as possible, to consider every possibility of failure. I knew that Molly would have appreciated some reassurance now, but I had none to offer, and besides, it was all I could do to think my plan through to its end.

I knew, too, that it would be a disaster to be stopped for speeding. I’d rented the car with a false New York State driver’s license and counterfeit Visa credit card. We’d gotten by the car rental agency, but we would not survive the routine license check by a Massachusetts state trooper that inevitably accompanies a speeding ticket. There would be no record in their interstate computer data bank of my license, and the entire game would be over.

So I drove carefully through the morning rush-hour traffic to the town of Shrewsbury. At a little before eight-thirty we drove up to the small yellow ranch-style suburban house that belonged to a man named Donald Seeger.

Seeger was, to be honest, a calculated risk. He was a firearms dealer, the owner of two retail gun shops on the outskirts of Boston. He provided firearms for the state police and, as necessary, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (whenever the FBI needed to procure particular weapons quickly without going through cumbersome bureaucratic channels).

Seeger occupied a peculiar gray area of the legal firearms market, somewhere between the gun manufacturers and retail customers, who for one reason or another require such great discretion that they cannot deal directly either with distributors or the traditional retail outlets.

More important, though, I knew him just well enough to trust him. A law school classmate of mine had grown up in Shrewsbury and knew Seeger as a family friend. Seeger, who rarely dealt with lawyers, and (like virtually everybody, it seems) despised the lot of them, needed some quick (and free) legal advice on dealing with a disgruntled small-arms manufacturer, my law school friend told me. It certainly wasn’t my area of expertise, but I had an associate dig up the answer for him. Seeger was duly grateful, and took me out to a thank-you dinner at a good steak house in Boston. “If I can ever do anything for you,” he told me over filet mignon, hoisting his mug of Bass ale, “you just give me a call.” At the time, I figured I’d never see the guy again. Now, however, it was time to collect.

His wife answered the door in a faded housedress decorated with tiny blue cornflowers.

“Don’s at work,” she said, squinting at us suspiciously. “He usually leaves between seven-thirty and eight.”

Seeger’s office-cum-warehouse was a long, narrow, unmarked brick building on a busy main strip a few miles away, near a Ground Round. To all outside appearances, it might have been a public storage facility, perhaps a dry-cleaning plant, but the security system within was quite sophisticated.

He was naturally surprised to see me when I rang, but rushed toward the door with a broad smile. He was in his early fifties, physically quite fit, with a bull neck. He wore his blue blazer, which was about a size too tight on him, unbuttoned.

“The lawyer, right?” he said, ushering us past metal shelves stacked high with boxes of guns. “Ellison. What the hell you doing in this neck of the woods?”

I told him what I wanted.

Seeger, who is basically unflappable, paused for an instant, shrewdly assessing me.

He shrugged. “You got it,” he said.

“One more thing,” I added. “Would you be able to obtain specifications for a Sirch-Gate III Model SMD200W walk-through metal detector?”

He looked at me for a long, long time.

“I might,” he said.

“It’s important.”

“I figured as much. Yeah. I got a friend who’s a security consultant. I can get him to fax them over in a couple of minutes.”

I paid in cash, of course. By the time we had finished our transaction, the medical supply house in Framingham, ten miles or so down the road, was open for business.

The shop, which specialized in equipment for invalids, had quite a few wheelchairs on display. Most of them I could rule out at once. Once I explained that I was purchasing one for my father, the salesman immediately recommended that I choose one of the lightweight chairs, which were easier to lift into and out of a car. I told him, however, that my father was particular and not a little eccentric, that he preferred a chair made of as much steel, and as little aluminum, as possible. He wanted something sturdy.

Eventually, I settled on a good, solid, old-fashioned wheelchair made by Invacare. It was extremely heavy; its frame was constructed of brazed, tubular carbon steel, chrome-plated. But most important, the arm tubing was of sufficient diameter for my purposes.

I loaded it, enormously heavy in its cardboard carton, into the trunk, and dropped Molly at a nearby shopping mall to purchase a number of items: an expensive pin-striped blue suit two sizes larger than I usually wore, a shirt, cuff links, and a few other things.

While she shopped, I proceeded to a small auto-body garage in nearby Worcester. The owner, a large, rotund ex-convict named Jack D’Onofrio, had been recommended to me by Seeger. He was temperamental, Seeger explained, but a master metalworker. Seeger had called ahead and informed D’Onofrio that I was a good friend of his, that he should take care of me and I’d take care of him in return.

D’Onofrio, however, was not in good humor. He inspected the wheelchair irritably, distastefully, poking at the gray plastic armrests that were affixed to the steel arm tubing with Phillips-head screws.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “It’s not so easy trying to mill this kind of plastic. I could replace the armrests with teak. Make it a hell of a lot easier.”

I considered for a moment, then said, “Go ahead.”

“The steel shouldn’t be a problem. Cut and weld. But I’ll have to change the diameter of the front tubing.”

“The join must not show, even at close inspection,” I said. “What about using a surgical hacksaw to cut the tubing?”

“That’s what I planned to do.”

“Good. But we need it in an hour or two.”

“An hour?” he gasped. “You gotta be fucking kidding.” He waved his short, pudgy arms around the cluttered shop. “Looka this. We’re jammed. Totally raked. Up to our fucking eyeballs!”

An hour, even two hours, was pressing it but not impossible. He was negotiating, of course. I had no time to waste, however. I pulled out an envelope of bills and flashed them.

“We’re prepared to pay a premium,” I said.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The final meeting was the most difficult to arrange, and in some ways the riskiest. From time to time police forces, the FBI, and the CIA must call upon the services of specialists in undercover disguise techniques. Usually, they are trained in the theater, in makeup and prosthesis application, but undercover disguise is a highly specialized and rare art. The artist must be able to transform an undercover officer into someone else entirely unrecognizable, capable of withstanding the closest scrutiny. The techniques are therefore limited, and the artists few.

Perhaps the best, a man who had done occasional work for the CIA (as well as a long list of movie and television stars and several prominent religious and political leaders), had retired to Florida, I discovered. Finally, after several telephone calls to Boston costume and theatrical companies, I turned up the name of an old vet, a Hungarian named Ivo Balog, who had done some work for the FBI, so he was familiar with the requisite artistry. He had, I was informed, enabled the same FBI undercover officer to infiltrate a Providence-based Mafia family not once but twice. This was good enough for me. He worked out of an old office building in downtown Boston, as part owner of a theatrical makeup company. I reached him shortly before noon.

Since there was no time to drive into Boston and back, we arranged to have him meet me at a Holiday Inn in Worcester, where I had reserved a room for the day and night. In order to make time for me, he had to clear the remainder of his day; I let him know it would be more than worth his while.

“We have to split up,” I told Molly when we reached the Holiday Inn. “You finalize the flight arrangements. Meet me back here when you’re done.”

Ivo Balog was in his late sixties, with the coarse features and reddened complexion of a heavy drinker. It became apparent at once, however, that whatever Balog’s personal failings, he was indeed a wizard.

Meticulous and acutely intelligent, he spent perhaps a quarter of an hour simply studying my face and form before even opening his makeup case.

“But who will you be exactly?” Balog demanded.

My answer, which I thought was perfectly reasoned out, did not satisfy him. “What does the person you wish to become do for a living?” he asked. “Where does he live? Is he wealthy or not? Does he smoke? Is he married?”

We conversed for several minutes, concocting this false biography. Several times he objected to my suggestions, saying over and over again, his mantra, in his thickly accented English: “No. The essence of good design is simplicity.”

Balog bleached the color out of my dark brown hair and eyebrows and then combed gray dye through them. “I can add ten, perhaps fifteen years to your age,” he cautioned. “Anything more will be dangerous.”

He had no idea why I was doing this, but he unquestionably sensed the tension in both of us. I appreciated his thoroughness and caution.

He applied a chemical artificial-tanning lotion to my face, dabbing it on carefully to avoid any telltale lines. “This will take at least two hours to develop,” he said. “I assume we have that much time.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Let me see the clothes you’ll be wearing.”

He inspected the suit and highly polished black shoes, nodding with approval. Then he thought of something. “But the armor-”

“Here,” I said, holding up the Safariland “Cool Max” T-shirt, made of ultra-lightweight Spectra fiber, which Seeger had assured me is ten times stronger than steel.

“Nice,” Balog said admiringly. “Quite slim.”

By the time the tanning creme had done its work, Balog had applied enamel paint to darken my teeth and had fitted me with a fully realistic-appearing, neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper-gray beard and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

When Molly returned to the room, she did a true double take, her hand to her mouth.

“My God,” she said. “You fooled me for a second!”

“A second’s not good enough,” I said, then turned to look at myself for the first time in the hotel room mirror. I, too, was astonished. The transformation was nothing short of extraordinary.

“The chair’s in the trunk,” she said. “You’re going to have to give it a careful inspection. Listen…” She glanced at the makeup artist warily. I asked him to step into the hallway for a few moments so we could talk.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There was a problem with the hearing,” she said. “Ordinarily, Senate hearings are open to the public, except for those designated specifically as closed. But this time for some reason-maybe because it’s being televised live-they’re admitting only members of the press and ‘invited guests.’”

I replied calmly, unwilling to succumb to panic. “You said was. ‘There was a problem.’”

Her smile was wan; something was still troubling her. “I placed a call to the office of the junior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” she said. “I told him I was the administrative assistant to a Dr. Charles Lloyd of Weston, Massachusetts, who’s in Washington for the day and wants to see a real-live Senate hearing in action. The senator’s people are always delighted to do a favor for a constituent. A Senate pass is waiting for you at the hearing room.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

“Thanks,” I said. “But I don’t have any ID in that name, and there’s no time to-”

“They won’t be requesting ID at the security check. I asked-I told them your wallet had been pickpocketed; they suggested you call the D.C. police about that. Anyway, they never request ID for admittance to open hearings-they rarely require passes, for that matter.”

“And what if they check and discover there’s no such person?”

“They won’t check, and even if they did, there is such a person. Charlie Lloyd is the chief of the surgical division at Mass. General Hospital. He always spends the entire month in the South of France. I double-checked. Right now Dr. Lloyd and his wife are vacationing in the Îles d’Hyères, off the coast of Toulon, on the Côte d’Azur. Of course, his answering service is instructed only to tell callers he’s out of town. No one likes to hear that their surgeon’s boozing it up in Provence or whatever.”

“You’re a genius.”

She bowed modestly. “Thank you. Now, about the flight-”

I sensed immediately from her tone that all was not right. “No, Molly. There isn’t a hitch in the flight, is there?”

She replied with a sudden edge of hysteria. “I called every single charter company within a hundred-mile radius. I could find only one that had a plane available at this late notice. Everyone else has been booked for at least a week.”

“So you booked that plane, I assume…?”

She hesitated. “Yes. I did. But it’s not nearby. The company’s at Logan Airport.”

“That’s an hour away!” I thundered. I looked at my watch; it was after three o’clock in the afternoon. We had to be at the Senate before seven. That left us only four hours! “Tell them to have the plane meet us at Hanscom. Pay whatever they ask. Just do it!”

“I did it!” Molly exploded in return. “I did it, dammit! I offered to double, even triple their rates! But the only plane they had-a twin-engine Cessna 303-wasn’t going to be available until noon or one, and then it had to be fueled and whatever else they-”

“Shit, Molly! We have to be in Washington by six o’clock at the latest! Your goddamned father-”

“I know!” She had raised her voice almost to a shriek; tears were coursing down her cheeks. “You think I’m not aware of that every second, Ben? The plane’ll be there at Hanscom in half an hour.”

“That barely gives us enough time! The flight takes something like two and a half hours!”

“There’s a regular commercial shuttle leaving Boston every half hour, for God’s sake! There should be no problem-”

“No! We can’t take a commercial flight. That’s insane. At this point? It’s far too risky, if for no other reason than the guns.” Once again I looked at my watch and did a swift calculation. “If we leave now, we should just barely make it to the Senate.”

I let Balog in, paid him, thanked him for his speedy assistance, and showed him out.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

It was ten minutes after three.

SIXTY-EIGHT

At a few minutes past three-thirty, we were airborne.

Molly had, as usual, come through in the clutch. The architectural plans of all public buildings in Washington, D.C., are a matter of public record, filed in the city records bureau. The problem, however, is obtaining them; but a number of private firms in Washington specialize in such searches for a fee. While I was becoming a dignified, wheelchair-bound older man, Molly had contacted one of these firms and-at an exorbitant cost for expediting the service-had had them fax her, at a local copy shop, photocopies of the blueprints of the Hart Senate Office Building.

While that was in the works, she had, posing as an editor of The Worcester Telegram, contacted the office of the senator from Ohio who served as vice-chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. The senator’s press aide was more than happy to fax this editor the latest schedule for tonight’s historic hearing.

Thank God, I told myself, for facsimile technology.

During the two-and-a-half-hour flight, we scrutinized the schedule and the plans until I felt sure my plan was workable.

It seemed to be foolproof.

At 6:45, the chair-car van I had hired at the airport pulled up to the entrance of the Hart Senate Office Building. A few minutes earlier, the driver had, as we requested, dropped Molly off several blocks away at a car-rental agency. She was angry about this aspect of my plan: if I was risking my life to save that of her father’s, why should she be reduced to, in effect, driving the getaway car? She had done that in Baden-Baden, and didn’t want to do it again.

“I don’t want you there,” I told her on the way to the Capitol. “Only one of us should be subjected to this danger.”

She sputtered in protest, but I went on: “And even if you were in disguise, it’s way too risky for both of us to be there. People are going to be watching very closely-we can’t afford to be seen together. Either one of us might be recognized; having two of us there at least doubles the chance that we’ll be spotted. And this is a job that requires only one person.”

“But if you don’t know the identity of the assassin, why is the disguise necessary?”

“There will be others-working for Truslow or the Germans-who will no doubt be briefed on my appearance. And who’ll be instructed to find me-and to eliminate me,” I replied.

“All right. But I still don’t understand why you can’t just smuggle a gun through the press gallery and take out the assassin. I doubt there’s a metal detector there.”

“Maybe there is a metal detector there tonight, though I doubt it. But in any case, it isn’t just a matter of smuggling a gun in. The press gallery’s on the second floor-too far away from the witness stand. And too far away from where the assassin will have to be stationed.”

“Too far?” Molly objected. “You’re a good enough shot. Christ, I’m a good enough shot!”

“That’s not the point,” I said abruptly. “I have to be there, in proximity to the assassin, in order to determine which one he is. The press gallery’s too distant.”

I had overruled her, and she had reluctantly acquiesced. In matters of medicine she was the expert; in this I was-or, at least, I had to be.

The Capitol was lit up as I approached, its dome brilliant against the evening dusk. The traffic was snarled with weary commuters trying to get home from their government jobs.

Outside the Hart building a large crowd had gathered: spectators, onlookers, what appeared to be members of the press. A long line snaked out the door, presumably people waiting to be admitted to Room 216, dignitaries and the well connected who’d been issued special passes.

It was a glittery crowd, and no surprise: tonight’s extraordinary hearing was a hot ticket in Washington, gathering as it did some of the leading power brokers in the nation’s capital.

Including the new Director of Central Intelligence, Alexander Truslow, who had just returned from a visit to Germany.

Why was he here?

Two of the four major American television networks were carrying the coverage live, preempting regularly scheduled programming.

How would the world react when they saw that the surprise witness was none other than the late Harrison Sinclair? The shock would be extraordinary.

But it would be as nothing compared with the assassination of Sinclair on live television.

When would he come out?

And from where?

How could I possibly stop him, protect him, if I didn’t know when and how he would appear?

The driver secured my wheelchair to the platform at the back of the van and electrically lowered it to the ground. It gave off a high mechanical whine. Then he detached the wheelchair and helped me up the ramp. When he had wheeled me into the crowded entrance lobby, I paid him, and he left.

I felt exposed and vulnerable and deeply afraid.

For Truslow and his people, and the new Chancellor of Germany, the stakes were enormous. They could not risk exposure, that was certain. Two men-two insignificant men, really-stood between them and their own particular version of global conquest. Between them and dividing up the spoils of a new world; between them and an incalculable fortune. Not a measly five or ten billion, but hundreds of billions of dollars.

What, compared to that, were the lives of two spooks, Benjamin Ellison and Harrison Sinclair?

Was there any question now that they’d stop at nothing to have us, as they say in the spy business, neutralized?

No.

And there, in the room just beyond the crowd in which I sat, beyond the two sets of metal detectors, beyond the two rings of security guards, sat Alexander Truslow, beginning his opening remarks. No doubt his own security people were planted everywhere.

So where was the assassin?

And who was the assassin?

My mind raced. Would they recognize me despite the precautions I’d taken to disguise myself?

Would I be recognized?

It seemed unlikely. But fear is irrational sometimes, not subject to logic.

To all appearances, I was an amputee in a wheelchair. I had bound my legs underneath me, so that I was sitting on them. The wheelchair I had selected was wide enough to accommodate this. Balog, the makeup wizard, had hastily tailored the suit pants so that they looked like the sort of adaptation a real amputee would have made to an elegant suit. A lap blanket completed the effect. No one would be looking for a legless older man in a wheelchair.

My hair was quite convincingly gray, as was my beard, and the age wrinkles in my skin could withstand the closest scrutiny. My hands bore slight liver spots. My horn-rimmed glasses imparted a professorial dignity that, in combination with everything else, utterly altered my appearance. Balog had refused to do anything less subtle than that, and now I was glad of it. I appeared to be a diplomat or a business executive, a man in his late fifties or early sixties who had unfairly suffered the ravages of aging. In no way did I look like Benjamin Ellison.

Or so I was convinced.

Toby Thompson, of course, had been my inspiration for the disguise. A man I would never see again, never be able to confront directly. He had been killed, but he had given me an idea.

A man in a wheelchair both attracts attention and deflects it. This is one of the quirks of human nature. People turn to stare at you, but just as quickly-as anyone who’s ever been wheelchair-bound will tell you-they look away, as if embarrassed to be caught staring. As a result, the person in the wheelchair often attains a peculiar anonymity.

I had taken care, too, to arrive as late as possible, though, of course, not too late. An excess of time spent sitting in the hearing room, where I stood a chance, however small, of being recognized, would be dangerous.

I had taken another precaution as well, which was Molly’s idea. Since one of the most powerful human senses is that of smell, which often works on us subliminally, she had suggested placing a small quantity of an acrid, medicinal-smelling chemical on the seat of the chair. This hospital odor would, subtly and unstatedly, complete my disguise. It was, I thought, brilliant.

Now I waited in the milling crowd, looking around with gravitas befitting my imagined station for a place to enter the line. A middle-aged couple kindly gestured to me to get in line ahead of them. I took them up on their offer, wheeled myself over, and thanked them.

There was a long table by the metal detectors, manned by young Capitol Hill staffers who were giving out pale blue passes to those on their lists of invited guests. When the line had reached the table, I took my card in the name of Dr. Charles Lloyd of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.

One by one, people were being guided through the metal detector. As occasionally happens, there were several false alarms. A man ahead of me passed through the gate and set off the alarm. He was asked to remove all keys and change from his pockets. From the specs Seeger had provided for me, I knew that the metal detector was a Sirch-Gate III, that at its center it was sensitive enough to detect 3.7 ounces of stainless steel. I knew, too, that the security precautions would be extensive.

Hence, of course, the wheelchair. I knew that Toby had on more than one occasion carried a pistol through airport metal detectors simply by placing it beneath a sheet of lead foil under his chair’s seat cushion. I didn’t dare be quite that bold, though. A gun thus concealed would be too easily discovered in a perfunctory search.

The American Derringer Model 4, which is quite an unusual gun, had been built into an arm of the wheelchair. It would be indistinguishable from the surrounding steel.

So as I wheeled up to the search gate, I remained fairly confident that the gun would not be found.

But my heart pounded loudly and swiftly in my chest. It filled my ears with a rapid, thunderous beat that blocked out all other sounds.

I felt a rivulet of sweat run down my forehead, over my left eyebrow, and drop into my eye.

No, my heartbeat could not be heard. But my sudden perspiration was evident to all. Any security agent trained to look for signs of stress or nervousness would zero in on me. Why was this prosperous-looking gentleman in a wheelchair sweating so heavily? The lobby was neither stuffy nor particularly hot; in fact, a cool breeze ran through it.

I should have taken something to control my automatic nervous responses, but I couldn’t take the chance of dulling my reactions.

And as beads of sweat rolled down my face, one of the security guards, a young black man, beckoned me over to one side.

“Sir?” he said.

I glanced over at him, smiled pleasantly, and wheeled myself toward where he stood, on one side of the metal detector.

“Your pass, please?”

“Surely,” I said, and handed him the pale blue card. “God, when does winter come? I simply can’t bear this weather.”

He nodded distractedly, looked quickly at the pass, and handed it back. “I love it just this temperature,” he replied. “Wish it could stay like this all year. Winter gets here all too soon-I hate cold weather myself.”

“I love it,” I said. “I used to love skiing.”

He smiled apologetically. “Sir, are you…”

I guessed at what he was trying to say. “I can’t get out of this damned thing easily, if that’s what you mean.” I smacked the gleaming teak armrests, in imitation of Toby. “Hope I’m not disrupting anything.”

“No, sir, not at all. Obviously you can’t go through the gate. I’m supposed to use one of those handheld deals.”

He was referring to the Search Alert handheld metal detection unit, which emitted an oscillating tone. When it came near metal, the frequency of the tone shot up.

“Go right ahead,” I said. “Again, sorry about all the inconvenience.”

“No problem, man. No problem at all. I’m sorry to have to do this to you. It’s just that they’re stepping up security tonight for some reason.” From a table next to the gate he took the small handheld device, a box attached to a long U-shaped metallic loop. “You’d think it’d be enough they make you get these passes. But they’re juicing up all the security. There’s another gate up there”-he pointed at the security station at the entrance to the hearing room a few yards away-“so you’re gonna have to go through this all over again. Guess you’re used to it, huh?”

“It’s the least of my problems,” I said placidly.

The device whined as he brought it near me, and I tensed. He ran it up my legs, over my knees, and suddenly, when it got to my thighs-and the concealed pistol-the box whooped up to a high pitch.

“What’ve we got here?” he muttered more to himself than to me. “Damn thing’s too sensitive. The metal in the chair’s setting it off.”

And as I sat there, dripping with sweat, the blood rushing in my ears, I suddenly heard the amplified voice of Alexander Truslow, coming from the loudspeaker system in the hall.

“… wish to thank the committee,” he was saying, “for calling public attention to this grave problem besetting the agency I so love.”

The guard dialed down the sensitivity knob and ran it over me again.

Once again, as it neared the arm of the chair, where the gun was concealed, it emitted a shrill metallic wail.

I tensed again, and felt droplets of sweat falling off my brow, my ears, the end of my nose.

“Goddamned thing,” the guard said. “Pardon my French, sir.”

Truslow’s voice again, clear and melodious:

“… certainly make my own job easier. Whoever this witness is, and whatever the substance of his testimony, it can only benefit us.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d love to get in there before Truslow’s finished his testimony.”

He stepped back, switched the machine off in frustration, and said exasperatedly: “I hate those things. Go on around this way.” He escorted me around the metal detector gate. I nodded, cocked my head gamely in a kind of salute, and wheeled ahead to the next security station. It seemed to be a bottleneck; a sizable crowd was gathered there. Some of them were craning their necks, trying to see into the hearing room. What was the problem? What was the delay?

Again Truslow’s voice over the loudspeakers, calm and gracious: “… any testimony that can fling open the shutters and let in the light of day.”

Inwardly I cursed, my whole body screaming: Move it, damn it! Move! The assassin was already in place, and in a matter of seconds Molly’s father would walk into the room.

And here I was, detained by a bunch of rent-a-cops!

Move, goddamn it!

Move!

Again I was waved around to the side of the metal detector gate. This time it was a woman, white, middle-aged, with brassy blond hair, a buxom figure within an ill-fitting blue uniform.

She inspected my pass sourly, glanced up at me, and summoned someone over.

Here I was, a matter of feet, mere feet, from the entrance to Room 216, and this goddamned woman was taking her goddamned time.

From the hearing room I heard a loud gaveling. A murmur in the crowd. The sudden dazzlingly bright flash of cameras.

What was it?

Had Hal arrived in the room?

What the hell was going on?

“Please,” I said as the woman returned with another middle-aged woman, this one black and of thinner build, apparently her superior. “I’d like to get inside as soon as possible.”

“Hold on a second,” the blond woman said. “Sorry.”

She turned to her boss, who said, “I’m sorry, Mister, but you’re going to have to wait until the next recess.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. No! It couldn’t be!

From the hearing room, the stentorian tones of the committee counsel: “Thank you, Mr. Director. We all appreciate your coming here and lending your support to what can only be a painful time for the Central Intelligence Agency. At this point, with no further ado, we would like to bring in our final witness of these hearings. I would ask that there be no flash photography, and that everybody in the room please remain seated while-”

“But I have to get in there!” I objected.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the boss objected, “but we have our instructions not to admit anyone further at this time, until there’s a recess called or a break of some kind. I’m sorry.”

I sat, almost paralyzed with fear and anxiety, looking beseechingly at the two security guards.

In just seconds, now, Molly’s father would be murdered.

I couldn’t just sit here. I had come too far-we had come too far-to let this happen.

I had to do something.

SIXTY-NINE

Staring them down, eyes flashing with indignation, I said: “Look, it’s a medical emergency.”

“Of what sort, sir-”

“It’s medical, dammit. It’s personal. I don’t have any time!” I indicated my lap-my bladder, or my bowels, or whatever they chose to conclude.

This was a desperate move. I knew from the blueprints that there was no public restroom in the lobby. The only one equipped for the handicapped was outside the hearing room. But there was a public facility two flights up, which I could get to without going through security. I knew that, but would they? It was a calculated risk. And if they did?

The black woman shrugged, then grimaced.

“All right, sir-”

I felt my body flood with relief.

“-go on through. There’s a men’s restroom off to the left that has handicapped facilities. But, please, don’t enter the hearing room until…”

I didn’t wait for her to finish. With a great spurt of energy I wheeled off to the left, toward the entrance to the hearing room.

Another guard manned the entrance. From where I sat, I had an excellent vantage point. Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building was a spacious, modern, two-floor chamber built with television in mind. Standing floodlights illuminated the entire room, for the sake of the television cameras. There were panels inset in the walls for cameras to be trained down on the hearing room; and, on the second floor, the press gallery, behind plate glass and toward the rear of the room.

Where was he?

The press gallery? Had the assassin been infiltrated using false press credentials? Easily done, of course, but too far from the front of the room for an accurate shot.

He would almost certainly have to be using a small firearm, probably a handgun. Anything else would be too detectable within the space of the room. This was not a classic sniper situation with a rooftop and a rifle. He would have to use a pistol. Somehow he had to have smuggled a pistol into the room.

Which meant he would have to be within the killing field. He would have to be located somewhere at close range. In theory, a handgun is accurate at distances of three hundred feet or more, but the closer you can get, the more accurate, the more reliable, the shot.

Now I was out of the line of sight of the security guards who had admitted me through the second checkpoint.

Swallowing hard, I wheeled up the ramp and directly into the room.

Another uniformed guard stood by the entrance.

“Excuse me-”

But this time I plunged ahead, ignoring the guard. My calculation was accurate: he would not leave his post to chase down a man in a wheelchair.

Now I was in the main room. I scanned the crowded rows of seats. It was impossible to see everyone, but I knew he had to be here, had to be here somewhere!

Where-who-was the assassin?

Seated among the spectators?

I turned now toward the front of the room, where the senators sat at a raised mahogany semicircle. Some of them consulted notes; others held their hands over microphones planted in front of them as they chatted.

Behind them, against the wall, was a row of aides, well-dressed young men and women. In front of the high mahogany podium was a row of three stenographers, two women and one man, sitting at their keyboards, typing away silently with lightning speed.

And behind the row of senators, at the precise center, was a door, toward which the eyes of all spectators were trained. The room fairly crackled with tension. That was the door through which the senators entered. It had to be the door through which Sinclair would enter.

The assassin had to be within a hundred feet or so of that door.

So where the hell was he?

And who the hell was he?

I looked over toward the witness table, which faced the row of senators. It was empty, awaiting the surprise witness. Behind it was an empty row of chairs, cordoned off, probably for security reasons. A few rows behind the witness table I saw Truslow, dressed immaculately in a double-breasted suit. Despite having just returned from Germany, he didn’t look a bit tired; his silver hair was combed and parted neatly. Was there a glint of triumph, of satisfaction, in his eyes? Beside him sat his wife, Margaret, and a couple I took to be his daughter and son-in-law.

I wheeled slowly down the side aisle, toward the front of the room. People glanced toward me, then quickly away, in that manner I’d become accustomed to.

It was time to begin.

Once again I scanned the layout of the entire room, affixing it pictorially in my memory. There were a limited number of positions from which a gunman could fire, hit his target-and plausibly attempt to escape.

I breathed deeply, tried to get my thoughts in some semblance of order. Rule out any positions beyond three hundred feet.

No-rule out any beyond two hundred feet. And within one hundred feet, the odds increased astronomically.

All right. Of those positions within one hundred feet, by far the most likely were those situated close to an exit. That meant, since the only exits were in the front or in the back, that the gunman would very likely be seated or standing front-center, front-right, or front-left.

Next… of those, rule out any without a direct line of fire to the witness stand. Which meant I could safely rule out ninety-five percent of the seats in the room.

From where I was I could see mostly backs of heads. The assassin might be a man or a woman, which meant I couldn’t rely on the standard search image-the youngish, physically fit male. No; they were too clever. I couldn’t discount the possibility that it was a woman.

Children were rule-outs… but an adult midget might pose as a child: bizarre, yes, but I could not afford to rule out the bizarre. Everyone within the area I had selected would have to be scrutinized. Systematically, I sighted each person in a strategic firing position, and was able to rule out only two: a young girl in a Peter Pan collar who really was a young girl; and a distinguished-looking old woman who my instincts told me really was an old woman.

If my calculations were right, then, that brought the pool of likely suspects down to perhaps twenty individuals, all near the front of the room.

Move.

I accelerated the wheelchair’s pace until I neared the front. Then I slowed, and veered the chair to within a few inches of the people seated at the ends of the aisles.

Here and there I felt a jolt of recognition, but the audience, naturally, was filled with familiar faces. Not friends of mine, certainly, but dignitaries. Personalities. The sort of people who are written up in The Washington Post Style section, who appear on Larry King Live.

Where was he?

Focus. Dammit, I had to focus, to concentrate my powers of perception, to parse the ambient room noise from thought noise. And then separate the usual babble of human thought from the thoughts of a man or woman who was preparing to carry out a public, excruciatingly tense, methodically executed assassination. These would be the thoughts of someone concentrating with great intensity.

Focus.

Nearing a man in a three-piece suit-sandy-haired and early thirties, the build of a football player, seated at the end of the fourth row-I bowed my head and rolled by slowly as if I were finding it difficult to maneuver.

And heard:… make partner or not and when? Because ah sweet Jesus if I don’t know by… An attorney; Washington crawled with them.

Keep on.

Next, a scruffy-looking late-teenage boy, acne-scarred face, dressed in an army-navy surplus peacoat. Too young? And it came: won’t call me because I’m not going to call her first…

A woman who looked to be in her late fifties, primly dressed, sweet face, ruby red lipstick. Poor man how does he get around the poor soul? She was thinking about me, it had to be.

I rolled a little faster now, head still bowed.

fucking nest of spies hope they fucking do away with the goddamn thing totally. A tall man in his late forties in a work shirt, earring in his left ear, ponytail.

Was he possible? Not what I expected; not the intense, laser-beam concentration of a professional killer.

I stopped two feet from him, focused.

Focused.

get home I finish the piece tonight maybe revise tomorrow morning see what the Times op-ed editor thinks.

No. A writer, a political activist. Not a killer.

Now I had reached the front row and began slowly to wheel down the aisle, across the very front of the room, extremely conspicuous.

People were staring at me, wondering where I was going. Guy’s going to just wheel all the way across are they allowed to do that?

And: so close to all these senators how can I get closer-

Stop!

get their autographs if they’ll let me…

Move.

An ash-blond woman in her fifties, anorexic-looking, with sunken cheeks, the too-tight facial skin that comes from excessive plastic surgery-a Washington socialite, from the look of her:… chocolate mousse with raspberry sauce or maybe a nice big slab of apple flan with a mountain of vanilla ice cream and don’t I deserve it I’ve been so good…

I rolled faster, and faster, concentrating with all my might, glancing at the faces intermittently, head bowed, listening. The thoughts were coming in a torrent now, a confusing, kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic rush of emotions and ideas and notions, glimmerings of the most private feelings, the most banal contemplations, anger, love, suspicion, excitement…

… promoted over me how can…

Faster.

… from the darned Department of Justice if…

Move!

Again and again my eyes swept the rows of spectators, then the row of well-dressed senatorial aides, then the stenographers seated before the mahogany podium at their silent keyboards, all of whom were bowed in ferocious concentration over their keyboards.

No.

didn’t put anything in writing and there shouldn’t be any records…

A murmur swept the room. I looked up toward the front of the room as I advanced across the front row of spectators, and saw the door at the front of the room open a crack.

Faster.

… Kay Graham’s dinner party when the Vice President asked me… I swiveled my head from side to side desperately. Where was the gunman? No sign of him yet, not a sign, and Hal was about to appear, and it would all be over!

… the legs on that babe if there’s any way to get her phone number maybe I can ask Myrna to call personnel but then won’t she…

And suddenly, with a jolt, I saw that I had completely overlooked the most obvious place of all! I whirled my head toward the podium, toward the steno pool, and when I noticed an odd discrepancy, I felt my stomach muscles tense.

Three stenographers. Two of them, the two women, were typing away furiously, the continuous folded sheets of paper moving up out of their stenotype machines and around to the receptacle tray.

One of them, however, did not seem to be working. He, a dark-haired young man, was looking up at the door. Odd that he would have the leisure to look around when his colleagues did not; how easy it would be to insert a professional gunman into the stenographic pool. Why the hell hadn’t I thought of it? I jerked my chair toward him wildly, studying him in quarter profile, and the stenographer glanced idly around at the audience, and…

… and I heard something.

Not from the stenographer, who was too far away for me to read his thoughts. But over my left shoulder, just ahead.

Zwölf.

Just a blip of a word, seemingly a nonsense word at first, but then it came clear: it was German. A number. Twelve.

Elf.

There it was again, from over my shoulder. Eleven. Someone was counting in German.

I whipped the chair back around, away from the row of senators, toward the audience. Someone seemed to be striding toward me; I could see a shape in my peripheral vision. And a voice, spoken: “Sir? Sir?”

Zehn.

A security guard was moving toward me, gesturing to me to move out of the front of the room. A security guard, tall and crew cut, dressed in a gray suit, holding a walkie-talkie transmitter.

Where the hell? Where the hell? I ran my eyes up and down the front row, looking for a likely gunman, and glimpsed a pleasingly familiar face, probably someone I knew, some old friend, and kept searching-

And heard: Acht Sekunden bis losschlagen. Eight seconds to strike.

And saw that pleasingly familiar face again, and recognized it: Miles Preston. Just a few feet away.

My old drinking buddy, the foreign correspondent I had befriended in Leipzig, East Germany, years ago.

Miles Preston?

Why was he here? If he was covering the event, why wasn’t he in the press gallery? Why would he be here?

No, of course.

The press gallery was located too far away.

The foreign correspondent I had befriended… No. He had befriended me.

He had come up to me, sitting alone at the bar. Introduced himself.

And then he was in Paris when I was there.

He had been assigned to me, a brand-new CIA boy. A classic black cultivation. His job had been to cultivate a friendship, subtly learn what he could-

Foreign correspondent: an ideal cover.

The security guard began to lope toward me, quickly and with great determination.

Miles Preston, who knew so much about Germany.

Miles Preston was not a British subject. He was-he had to be-a Stasi plant, a German agent, now gone freelance. He was thinking in German.

Zwölf Kugeln in der Pistole. Twelve bullets in the chamber.

And our eyes locked.

Sechs.

I recognized Miles, and he-I was sure-he recognized me. Beneath my disguise, my gray hair and beard and glasses, it was my eyes, the glint of recognition in my eyes, that identified me.

He gave me a cold, almost impassive stare, his eyes narrowing slightly. Then he returned his fierce gaze to the precise center of the room. To the door that was now open a crack.

It was him!

Ich werde nicht mehr als zwei brauchen. I will need no more than two.

A man emerged from the door at the front of the room.

The room broke out in excited whispers. Spectators craned their necks, struggling to get a glimpse.

Sicherung gelöst. Safety off.

It was the chairman of the committee, a tall, gray-haired, barrel-chested man in a dove-gray suit. I recognized him as the Democratic senator from New Mexico. He was engaged in conversation with someone entering behind him, a man in shadow.

Gespannt. Cocked.

But I recognized the silhouette.

Ausgang frei. Exit clear.

The man behind him was Hal Sinclair. The audience had yet to realize who it was, but in a second or two they would. And Miles Preston would-

No! I had to act now!

Hier kommt er. Los. Here he comes-now! Bereit zu feuern. Ready to fire.

And then Harrison Sinclair, tall and proud, dressed immaculately, his beard shaven, his hair neatly trimmed, strode slowly through the door, accompanied by a bodyguard.

There was an audible gasp throughout the crowd, and then the hearing room erupted.

SEVENTY

The room was in an uproar, whispers becoming loud murmurings and excited exclamations, steadily louder and louder.

The unthinkable. The surprise witness was… a dead man. A man the nation had buried, had mourned, months ago.

The press gallery was in turmoil. Several people at the back of the room were running out, probably to place telephone calls.

Sinclair and the committee chairman, cognizant of the commotion Sinclair’s appearance had caused, but oblivious of what was about to happen, continued walking across the hearing room floor to the witness box, where Hal was to be sworn in.

As the crew-cut guard rushed toward me, his hand at his holster, closing the gap between us, coming closer and closer…

Miles had gotten to his feet, unnoticed in all the pandemonium. Reached his hand inside the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

Now!

I depressed the button at the front of the right armrest, which caused the teak panel to flip upward, exposing the gun, grip up, barrel down, fitting snugly into the metal arm tubing.

Two shots only.

That was the drawback of the American Derringer, but it was a price I had to pay.

It was already cocked. I drew it out, slid the safety to the side with my thumb, and-

There was no clear line of fire between me and the assassin! The guard, loping toward me, was blocking my path!

And suddenly, the chaos, the anarchy, was pierced by an earsplitting scream, a female cry from somewhere above us, and hundreds of heads were turned upward toward where the shrieking was coming from. It was coming from one of the square holes in the walls, one of the niches for television cameras, but there was no camera lens jutting out of this one; instead, it was a woman, shouting at the top of her lungs.

“Sinclair! Get down! Dad!

“He’s got a gun!

“Get down!

“They’re going to kill you!

“Get down!”

Molly!

How the hell did she get in here?

But there was no time even to think. The crew-cut guard froze, turned to his right, looked up in confusion, and now for an instant, for a split second, the target was clear.

– and at that instant, pointing the gun directly at the assassin, I fired.

It was not a bullet that I fired.

No, there was far too great a chance of missing with a bullet.

It was a specially configured.410 Magnum shotgun shell, containing one-half ounce of lead pellets. One hundred and twelve pellets.

A shotgun shell in a pistol.

The explosion filled the room, which was now a cacophony of terrified screaming. People were out of their seats, running for the exits, some of them throwing themselves to the floor, seeking cover.

In the two seconds before the guard leapt on top of me, slamming me into the wheelchair, I saw that I had hit the German whose cover was Miles Preston. He had thrown his head back, dazed, his left arm shielding his eyes but too late. Blood ran down his face as the high-velocity impact of dozens of lead pellets wounded him, maimed him, disabled him. It was like having a handful of hot broken glass thrown in your face. He was thrown off balance, off his stride. In his right hand he was holding a small black automatic pistol. It dangled at his side, unfired.

Sinclair, I could see, had been tackled to the floor by someone, presumably his bodyguard, and most of the senators were crouching down, the whole chamber a Babel of screams and cries, deafeningly loud, and it seemed that everyone was rushing toward me all at once, everyone who wasn’t running toward the exits, who hadn’t flattened themselves on the floor.

I struggled with the guard, struggled to get the Derringer out of his powerful grasp. I barely managed to tumble out of the wheelchair, but my legs, which I had been sitting on for the better part of an hour, would not support me. The blood had left them; they were suffused with a dull tingling; they would not work. I could not get to my feet.

“Freeze!” he bellowed at me, wrestling over the gun.

One more shot! I had one more shot! One shot, and this one, the only one left in the chamber, was a.45 bullet, and if I could just get the goddamned gun free, and get the gun cocked, I could kill Miles, I could save Molly’s father, but the guard had tackled me to the floor beside the wheelchair, and now others were upon me, and Miles, I knew for certain that Miles, that professional killer, wounded and maimed though he was, had his automatic pistol out, had it aimed at Harrison Sinclair, and had squeezed the trigger to silence him forever-

– and then came the explosion.

I was overcome with a cold terror as I gave up struggling against the guard.

First one shot, and then two shots, one right after another, in all three enormous explosions, thundering in the room, followed by a split second of stunned silence and then an eruption of horrified screams and shouts.

Miles had fired three rounds.

He had killed Harrison Sinclair.

I had come close to immobilizing Miles. I had almost stopped him. Molly’s diversion had almost stopped him. We had almost blocked the assassin from killing Molly’s father.

But he had been too resourceful, too quick, too professional.

And, pinned against the floor by a half-dozen security guards now, the.45 round unfired in my gun, which the guard had wrested away from me, I felt myself go limp with exhaustion.

Tears-of frustration, of fatigue, of ineffable sadness-came into my eyes. I could no longer think.

Our plan, our brilliant plan, had failed. I had failed.

“All right,” I said, but it was a broken, hoarse whisper. I lay back, my back hard against the cold floor, while all around me chorused the shouts of horror.

As the crew-cut guard whipped out handcuffs, slipping them first over one wrist and then the other, I stared unbelievingly ahead, in the space between the guard’s arm and his chest, at the front.

I did not believe what I was seeing.

The assassin, Miles Preston, was lying in a crumpled heap at the base of the witness stand, his forehead missing, along with most of the front of his face.

Dead.

Above him, watching in dazed incredulity, was the tall, lanky, somewhat disheveled figure of Harrison Sinclair.

Alive.

And the last thing I saw before they took me away, the last sight, extraordinary and wonderful, virtually a miracle, was Molly. Up in the camera niche, in that square hole in the wall, in which she had first begun screaming.

But she was holding in her extended right hand a matte black pistol, and she was looking at the gun with what seemed to be disbelief, and I am sure that I saw on her face the faintest glimmerings of a smile.

The Washington Post

CIA Revelations Stun Nation

Senate Hearing Room Explodes in Gunfire After Surprise Appearance by Ex-CIA Director Harrison Sinclair, Long Believed Dead

BY ERIC MOFFATT

WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER

The Hart Senate Office Building last evening was the setting for one of the most amazing scenes to take place in the nation’s capital in recent memory.

During nationally televised hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into alleged corruption in the Central Intelligence Agency, at approximately 7:30 last night, Harrison Sinclair, the former Director of Central Intelligence who had been reported killed in a car accident last May, appeared without warning to give sworn testimony concerning what he said was a “massive international conspiracy” involving the present Director of Central Intelligence, Alexander Truslow, and the government of newly elected German Chancellor Wilhelm Vogel.

But as soon as Sinclair was brought into the hearing room by armed guards, gunfire erupted. One of the gunmen, who was killed, was identified only as a German national. The other assailant was reported to be Benjamin Ellison, 40, an attorney and former CIA operative. No other deaths were reported.

The New York Times

One Month After Incident at Senate Intelligence Committee Hearings, Questions Linger

BY KENNETH SEIDMAN

SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4-In the aftermath of the remarkable events in the Senate last month, the nation remains gripped by the spectacle of a CIA director once thought dead suddenly making an appearance on live television, and the equally astonishing assassination attempt that followed immediately on its heels.

But for all the headlines the Sinclair-Truslow matter occasioned, and the weeks of news analysis, much of the affair remains a mystery.

As is by now well known, Harrison Sinclair, director of the CIA until May of last year, faked his own death in order to escape the threat of death posed by those he was seeking to expose. It is also known that, for several hours following the traumatic incidents in Washington, Mr. Sinclair gave extensive testimony in closed session to the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence, exposing the activities of Alexander Truslow and his colleagues.

But what has become of Mr. Sinclair since the bloodshed in the Hart Office Building last month? Intelligence sources speculate that he may have been killed, but refuse to comment on the record. Five days after the event, Mr. Sinclair’s daughter, Molly, and her husband, Benjamin Ellison, were declared legally dead, after the small craft they were sailing off Cape Cod was discovered to have capsized. Intelligence sources would not confirm allegations that the couple, like Mr. Sinclair, were murdered. The fate of the three remains a mystery.

A Capitol Hill security spokesman stated recently that Ms. Sinclair was believed to have entered the hearing room through a loading dock beneath the building by posing as a food deliverywoman. The spokesman stated that Ms. Sinclair had obtained blueprints of the Hart Office Building and was familiar with them.

German Plot Revealed

The would-be assailant, a former East German citizen identified as Josef Peters, was reported to be an ex-employee of the former East German secret intelligence service, the Stasi. According to intelligence sources, Peters was the true identity of a well-known journalist named Miles Preston, who claimed to be a resident of Great Britain. The place of birth listed on Miles Preston’s passport is Bristol, England, but Bristol city officials have been unable to locate any birth record of a Miles Preston. Little is known about Josef Peters at the present time.

As for Alexander Truslow, Mr. Sinclair’s successor as Director of Central Intelligence, he remains in prison awaiting his treason trial in Washington Superior Court next month. The firm which he founded, Truslow Associates, Inc., has been charged with complicity in Mr. Truslow’s alleged treason, and has been shut down by government authorities pending further resolution of the matter.

The German government of Chancellor Wilhelm Vogel has resigned, and the heads of six German corporations, most prominent among them Gerhard Stoessel, the chairman of the Neue Welt real estate holding firm based in Munich, have been indicted and are facing trial.

Mr. Sinclair had charged that, with the assistance of CIA Director Truslow, Chancellor Vogel and his backers engineered this fall’s German stock market crash in order to gain election, after which they planned a corporate coup d’état of the German government and the establishment of hegemony over Europe. Whatever the truth of the Sinclair revelations, news of the Truslow-Vogel plot shook world governments and markets.

Yet it is still not known whether we have learned the entire story of the CIA conspiracy.

A Packet of Documents

Last week this reporter received by registered mail a packet of documents prepared and sent by a former CIA officer, James Tobias Thompson III, who died in an accident in his home several days before the events in Washington.

The documents appear to bolster Mr. Sinclair’s claims about Mr. Truslow’s illegal dealings with the German consortium.

But the package, according to postal authorities, appears to have been tampered with. One document referred to in Mr. Thompson’s cover letter concerned a CIA covert program called the “Oracle Project.”

That document, however, was missing from Mr. Thompson’s package. CIA spokesmen deny the existence of any such covert program.

Translated from Tribuno de Siena, p. 22

PUBLIC NOTICE

The Siena City Council welcomes with pleasure the establishment of the Crowell Clinic in the town of Costafabbri, in the Comune of Siena. The Crowell Clinic, a free medical clinic for children, is being run under the guidance of three new arrivals to the Siena area from the United States: Mr. Alan Crowell; his wife, Dr. Carol Crowell, who has an infant daughter, and Dr. Crowell’s father, Richard Hale.