“Ross Trumble,” he said. “All right, I don’t see any problem. Get them from him.”

Top was sitting up straight as he always sat with his long arms folded across his wide flat chest. The reflected light of the street lamp made highlights in his long glossy black hair. He said, “It’s so damn easy to tell a fellow to run it on up the flagpole when you don’t have to figure out how to stitch the flag.”

“If it was an easy job I wouldn’t need to have you do it.”

“Now you’re trying to flatter me.”

“And succeeding,” Forrester said. “What’s the flap?”

“Trumble used to be an FBI agent. He won’t be easy to crack.”

“He can’t keep those papers in his pocket twenty-four hours a day.”

“But he probably keeps them in a lock-up. You happen to know any unemployed safecrackers looking for work?”

“You may be making problems for yourself where there aren’t any to begin with. Maybe Trumble had security training once but he’s gone off the wagon and he’s got a lech for anything that wiggles. Why not get one of your lovely young friends to fry him while you take his place apart?”

“Two problems. One, the only girls I could trust with that kind of caper are Agency employees. But I don’t work for the Agency any more and the Agency frowns on its people freelancing. And two, Trumble’s leaving Washington day after tomorrow—back to Tucson for an indefinite stay. Like you.”

“Will he take the papers with him?”

“I guess that’s what he’s going out there for. To check out the details with the people at Matthewson-Ward and Shattuck. He wouldn’t be likely to leave the papers back here on top of his desk.”

“Then tail him out to Tucson and stick to him until you can pry open his files.”

“Yeah. Listen, you happen to know Diego Orozco up in Phoenix?”

“No.”

“Private detective, runs a confidential agency up there. I could maybe hire the use of one of his female operatives but it would cost you seventy-five a day plus travel and expenses. Eight cents a mile round trip Phoenix-Tucson, that’s twenty bucks, and expen—”

Forrester’s laugh cut him off and Spode darkened and said, “Sometimes I forget you’re a rich son of a bitch. But it’ll have to come out of your pocket, you can’t very well charge it up to the Government. And I’m still not clear just how vital this package of papers is to whatever you’re planning to put across.”

“Vital enough. I thought you heard me the first time. I intend to use every stick I can get my hands on to beat this insanity to death, because if somebody doesn’t Trumble and Breckenyear and the hardware merchants won’t be satisfied until they’ve blown the world up from under us.”

“You’ve already got my vote, you know. I didn’t ask for a speech—all I want to know is how badly you want Trumble’s file. You want it even if it has to come with my head in a basket?”

“Make your own judgment, Top.”

“Like I said, I just work here.”

The Senator’s face moved. “I want to live and if I ever have a kid I want him to live. That’s what it breaks down to.”

Spode brooded at him. “It’s not just politics anymore, is it? You mean that.”

“I mean it.”

“Then I’ll get the papers for you. But maybe you ought to have the meat wagon and a crash crew ready to collect me.” Spode grinned with his teeth and reached for the ignition key and Forrester got out and watched the car drive away.

Chapter Three

Forrester changed planes at Chicago. The jet broke through the smog overcast and the top of the snowcloud layer was a soft cotton mattress beneath the motionless belly of the airplane. The stewardess brought him a cup of hot black coffee and smiled. “My folks live in Phoenix, Senator—they voted for you.”

“How about you?”

Her laugh stirred her short blond hair. “The first time you ran for Congress I was fourteen. Anyhow I live in Los Angeles—I can’t vote in Arizona. But I would if I could.”

She went forward, emphasizing the sway of her long hips because she knew he was watching. Her kind had voted him into office because by accident of birth he had the looks and charm that worked in a society which equated celebrity with importance and which favored a candidate who was at his amusing best on late-night television.

As always, Les Suffield had booked two first-class seats for him so that he wouldn’t be disturbed. The Washington Post lay on the empty aisle seat beside him. It had given him a three-column spread across the middle of the front page. HOUSE-PENTAGON COLLUSION CHARGED. Forrester Alleges Secret Phaeton Power Play. There were sidebar heads: Breckenyear Denies Charges; Pentagon Says “No Comment.” The editorial inside was cautious: “If what Senator Forrester charges is true, then certainly the public deserves, and should demand, full disclosure in open hearings.” At least, he thought, it had served to redden Webb Breckenyear’s face.

Under the wings the weather cleared and the land began to heave and buckle, and the plane began its slow descent while still over New Mexico. Sprawls of weathered aridity, puckered by brown mountains of rock and pale earth. Another high stretch of desert, another mountain range, snow on the peaks; the plane banked and began to spiral in earnest. Mount Lemmon, bald with snow, could be recognized easily from the air: Tucson’s ten-thousand-foot landmark. Davis Monthan Air Force Base was a great grey expanse: it had been built well beyond the southeast edge of the town but Tucson had grown with swift carcinoma and now the curving rows of mass-produced tract houses and shopping centers all but encircled the base. Population 375,000, median income $8,200, nine percent of its housing units substandard, 33,000 people earning less than the poverty level—numbers meant nothing in human terms but served to placate Washington’s insatiable mania for columns of figures. Tucson was not a simple place and could not be dismissed by computer statistics.

The newcomer saw what he expected: the plastic holy land of the Good Life, warm dry winters, palms and cacti, constant sunshine. Until World War II there had been nothing but railroad yards, dude ranches, tuberculosis sanatoriums and thirty thousand or so people. Then had come the Cold War and the population explosion. SAC had moved in and the defense plants—Matthewson-Ward, Shattuck Industries, and the smaller ones. The onetime cowtown was now the second largest city in Arizona and contained nearly a third of the state’s population within its metropolitan area.

The boosters still hung banners across Broadway, “A Community on the March.” You still heard how Tucson was a grand place to raise a family. It was still a Middle American town, a joining town—Rotary, the Elks, the Lions, the Jaycees, the Eastern Star, the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the American Legion, the Knights of Columbus; it was a seller’s market for the Reader’s Digest and the Book-of-the-Month Club. But it was also a high crime center, a metropolis jammed with automobiles, a suburbanite sprawl with its old downtown center crumbling into slums. Alan Forrester could see the smog plainly, a well defined brown murk into which the plane descended.

The 707 landed with a lurch on the black tire smears that planes had left before it. It taxied toward the long west wing of the terminal and from his window Forrester could see the reporters waiting just inside the glass doors of the building. The jet engines unwound and passengers crowded into the aisles but Forrester kept his seat. He watched them go down the portable stair and cross the sun-blasted concrete to the door. The cluster of reporters broke in half like the Red Sea to let the passengers by, and Forrester’s attention focused on a tall long-haired woman fighting her way against the tide with frequent distracted smiles of apology as she squeezed through the door and came outside. It was Ronnie—Veronica Tebbel.