The Negotiator

He knew it was a gamble, one hell of a gamble. He had been told what he had been told, but he had no proof of it. If he was wrong, his fellow senators would put him down as just another hayseed who used serious words with no serious intent. But he knew he had to go on or lose the support of his new and very impressive financial backer.

“But maybe we do not have to look too far to find out who were the culprits of this fiendish act.”

The low buzz in the chamber died away. Those in the aisles, about to depart, stopped and turned.

“I would like to ask one thing: Is it not true that the bomb which killed that young man, the only son of our President, was designed, made, and assembled wholly within the Soviet Union, and provably so? Did that device not come from Russia?”

His natural demagoguery might have carried him further. But the scene disintegrated in confusion and uproar. The media carried his question to the nation within ten minutes. For two hours the administration fenced and hedged. Then it had to concede the contents of the summary of Dr. Barnard’s report.

By nightfall the bleak and black rage against someone unknown, which had run like a growling current through the people of Nantucket the previous day, had found a target. Spontaneous crowds stormed and wrecked the offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot at 630 Fifth Avenue in New York, before the police could throw a cordon ’round the building. Its panic-stricken staff ran upstairs seeking shelter from the mob, only to be rebuffed by the office workers on the floors above them. They escaped, along with the others in the building, through the help of the Fire Department when the Aeroflot floors were set afire and the whole building evacuated.

The NYPD got reinforcements to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations at 136 East 67thStreet just in time. A surging mob of New Yorkers tried to force their way into the cordoned-off street; fortunately for the Russians the blue-uniformed lines held. The New York police found themselves wrestling with a crowd intent on doing something with which many of the policemen privately sympathized.

It was the same in Washington. The capital’s police were forewarned and sealed off both the Soviet embassy and the consulate on Phelps Place just in time. Frenzied telephone appeals from the Soviet ambassador to the State Department were met with an assurance that the British report was still under examination and might prove to be false.

“We wish to see that report,” insisted Ambassador Yermakov. “It is a lie. I will be categorical. It is a lie.”

The agencies Tass and Novosti, along with every Soviet embassy in the world, issued a late-night flat denial of the findings of the Barnard report, accusing London and Washington of a vicious and deliberate calumny.

“How the hell did it get out?” demanded Michael Odell. “How the hell did that man Hapgood get to hear of it?”

There was no answer. Any major organization, let alone a government, ca

“One thing is certain,” mused Sta

Qui

Most of the bars had names like Las Vegas, Hollywood, California, their optimistic owners hoping that names redolent of foreign glamour would entice the wandering sailor to think that opulence lay beyond the chipped doors. By and large they were sleazy places, but warm and serving good beer.

Qui

Qui

He wandered up the Guit Straat and the Pauli Plein, took a small beer in each of the bars, then cut back into Schipperstraat and started again. The girls thought he wanted a woman but was having trouble making up his mind. The male customers ignored him, since they were always on the move themselves. A couple of barmen, on his third visit, nodded and gri

They were right, but in a different sense. He had no luck and before dawn rejoined Sam in the car. She was half asleep, the engine ru

“What now?” she asked as she drove him back to the hotel.

“Eat, sleep, eat, start again tomorrow night,” he said.

She was particularly erotic through the morning they spent in bed, suspecting Qui

Peter Cobb saw Cyrus Miller at his own request atop the Pan-Global Building in Houston the same day.

“I want out,” he said flatly. “This has gone too far. What happened to that young boy was awful. My associates feel the same. Cyrus, you said it would never come to that. You said the kidnap alone would suffice to… to change things. We never thought the boy would die. But what those animals did to him… that was horrible… immoral…”

Miller rose from behind his desk and his eyes blazed at the younger man.

“Don’t you lecture me about morality, boy. Don’t you ever do that. I didn’t want that to happen either, but we all knew it might have to. You, too, Peter Cobb, as God will be your judge-you, too. And it had to be. Unlike you I have prayed for His guidance; unlike you I have spent nights on my knees praying for that young man.

“And the Lord answered me, my friend; and the Lord said: Better that one young lamb go to the slaughter than that the whole flock perish. We are not talking about one man here, Cobb. We are talking of the safety, of the survival, of the very lives of the entire American people. And the Lord has told me: what must be, must be. That Communist in Washington must be brought down before he destroys the temple of the Lord, the temple that is this entire land of ours. Go back to your factory, Peter Cobb. Go back and turn the plowshares into the swords we must have to defend our nation and destroy the Antichrists of Moscow. And be silent, sir. Talk to me no more of morality, for this is the Lord’s work and He has spoken to me.”

Peter Cobb went back to his factory a very shaken man.

Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev also had a serious confrontation that day. Once again Western newspapers were spread over the long conference table ru

On his desk were more reports that needed no translation. They were in Russian, coming from ambassadors across the world, from consuls general and the U.S.S.R.’s own foreign correspondents. Even the East European satellites had had their anti-Soviet demonstrations. Moscow’s denials had been constant and sincere, and yet…