“As Les has been pointing out, I’m going into a tough son-of-a-bitch fight. It happens that I’m doing it, to use the hoariest phrase I can think of, for the good of my country and it also happens that if I win it may propel me right onto the presidential launching pad. But if I lose, I lose the whole bag of marbles. So I’m laying everything on the line. And I need to use every means I can to reduce the odds against me.”

“I can see that. But the risk, if you get caught—”

“If you get caught.”

“Put it any way you like. If I get caught it’s you they’ll roast, not me. Breckenyear knows who I work for.”

“Then don’t get caught. I won’t have any chance at all unless I know more than the opposition knows. I’ve got to stay ahead of them—and the more ignorant they are of how much I know, the better chance I’ve got to trip them up in public. I need exact appropriations figures on the Phaeton program from Breckenyear. That’s your job.”

“Couldn’t we get that from the request for appropriations the Pentagon sent up? At least that’s on the record.”

“Budget requests don’t mean a thing. They always request five million dollars’ worth of paperclips because the committee has to cut something out of the request to show how hard they’re guarding the American taxpayers’ interests. I need the hard figures—the appropriations Breckenyear and Guest actually intend to ram through Congress.”

“Just the Phaeton stuff?”

“That’s number-one priority. But get anything else you can. The more waste we can find, the more weight our case has. And if I challenge them on more than one item it’ll give us room to negotiate later—something we can give up on, to make it look as if we’re compromising.”

“Isn’t that exactly what you just accused them of doing?”

The Senator smiled. “Think of that.”

Spode grunted. Then he sighed. Finally he shook his head. “All right. First off, I’ll need to find out whether he keeps it locked up in the office or takes it home nights to work on.”

“You know the drill a lot better than I do.”

“You used to handle it all right.”

“A long time ago, Top.”

Spode stood up. “You’ll be in Arizona all week. What do I do with the stuff if I get it before you come back?”

“You damn well better have it before that. Hop a plane and bring it out to me.”

“Right.” He turned toward the door, stopped, and swung one foot up on the arm of the empty chair to buckle his galoshes. “You weren’t expecting the originals, I hope.”

“You’ve got a camera. Use it. We hardly want him tipping to the fact we’ve burgled his files.”

“Not even you could be that dumb,” Spode said. He grinned and went out and nodded to Suffield who was still on the phone.

Chapter Two

Alan Forrester drove home past the reservoir and along the Potomac in a gloom of lightly falling snowflakes. The desultory thump of the windshield wipers exacerbated his mood.

He drove up the curving slope of Arizona Terrace and ran the car into the garage, wondering whether he would have to dig the driveway out in the morning.

Mrs. Thomas had left the place immaculate. The bed had been turned down, his slippers set out and two wooden hangers left pointedly on the bed for his overcoat and suit. He hung up his things and went down the half-flight of stairs to the kitchen. Mrs. Thomas had left a note taped to the refrigerator door: Phone me or send a wire before you come back from the Wild West so I can stock the frigidair with milk & eggs. S. T.

He filled a small glass with ice cubes and Chivas Regal and carried it into the living room. He could hear the muted crack of icicles from rafters and trees. Only one lamp burned and the forty-foot room was lonely with gloom. He went around turning on lights and saw himself reflected in the wide glass patio doors, his slippered feet hidden in the deep jungle of the shaggy orange rug that Angie had bought over his protests. All the chairs and paintings were loud, vital, bold with primary colors; the room was full of her and Forrester felt savage with loss. It all came back in a piece—the apologetic telephone voice of the intern on emergency service, the bewildered rush across Washington to the hospital full of black faces and the burly cop, awkward and ill-at-ease: This fellow come through the red light, Senator. No, he don’t seem to’ve been drunk. Drivin’ a real old Chrysler, one of them big tanks with tailfins, of course we ’ll know more when we get the wreckage sorted out but right now it looks like as if he was hittin’ maybe forty, forty-five and those brakes just plain give out on him. Hit your wife’s car not exactly head-on, sir—sort of catty-corner on the front bumper, she was comin’ through there on the green light. Dumped Mrs. Forrester’s car right over on the roof and skidded it right up against that building on the corner. The man driving the Chrysler, he’s back here too, they got him under oxygen but there ain‘t a chance he’ll pull through either. I wish there was something I could do for you, Senator—I have to report these things every other day to somebody and there’s never been a one where I didn’t wish there was some kind of wand I could wave to bring the people back. Ain’t nothing I could say to you right now that would help make any sense out of this, sir.—I guess I won’t even try.

It had been almost a year ago but he still remembered the cop’s voice; he had clung to it as the only reality of that ghastly day, the voice of the man in uniform who in those fractured moments seemed the only authority, the only possible wisdom. Later the reason had come to him slowly: the event had made him once again the fourteen-year-old boy whose father in Army colonel’s uniform had taken him aside in the hospital corridor and told him his mother was dead. The two women in his life, gone under circumstances eerily similar. And at Angie’s funeral on a sun-bright Tucson day that had mocked the solemnity of the ritual he had watched the casket descend into the grave and wept because he had no son to whom he could try to explain it. Her voice had echoed in him, accusation beyond reply: We can’t just keep putting off till it’s convenient, darling. You’re forty years old, I’m thirty-four, we’ve been married almost six years. To hell with all these rationalized procrastinations—to hell with the damned population explosion. I want to get pregnant. When the old Chrysler had smashed brakeless through the red light she had been four months pregnant.

Her face had been full of joy those few months and he had humored her desire to redecorate the house flamboyantly; infected with her mood he had laughed at the growing discomfort of the colleagues and wives who came every other Wednesday to the traditional cocktails chez Forrester. Angie had been the compleat Washington hostess; she had delighted in the social hysteria of the capital, the Embassy Row receptions and Georgetown dinner parties at which lobbyists wheeled, wives gossiped, and much of the country’s political business was done.

There had been no gatherings in the house since the accident. The room remained empty of everything but Angie’s bright colors. Washington society had honored the Senator’s grief by granting him a mourning moratorium on invitations. But gradually, because he had to and not because he enjoyed it, he had begun to resurface, to accept the cards and calls. The newspaper chat columns had waited a decent interval and then had begun to describe him as “Washington’s most devastatingly eligible bachelor.” Hostesses had begun to pair him off with this Desirable Single Girl or that. He remained quite immune because he could by closing his eyes create a vision of Angie that was almost tactile. The way she pinched her lower lip with her teeth and arched her eyebrows into triangles when she was earnest; the casual elegance of her walk; the way she tossed her head, the way her chestnut hair shone in sunlight. She had often been contentious, stubborn; she was more exciting than cuddly, more challenging than comfortable; but it was the brightest light that lingered longest in the retina.