Evans reached behind him to open the door. “You’re too smart, Rand.”
“Not really. Once I suspected your color blindness, I remembered your momentary confusion on those rainbow-colored paths yesterday, when you started down the blue path to the pool and then changed your mind and took the yellow one to the lounge. Of course both colors only looked gray to your eyes.”
“Walk backward,” Evans told Leila. “You’re coming with me.”
“Who paid you to spy on the conference?” Rand asked. “What country?”
“Country?” Evans snorted. “I worked for countries when Fanger knew me. Now I work where the real money is.”
He moved down the hall, dragging Leila with him, and Rand followed. Felix Bollinger was standing by the door, holding it open, the perfect manager directing a departing guest to his waiting car.
“Out of my way,” Evans told him.
“I hope your stay was a pleasant one,” Bollinger said. Then he brought a gun from behind his back and shot Evans once in the head...
Leila Gaad downed a stiff shot of Scotch and said to Rand, “You would have let him go, just to save me! I must say that wasn’t very professional of you.”
“I have my weaknesses,” Rand admitted.
Felix Bollinger downed his own drink and reached again for the bottle he’d supplied. “A terrible opening for my resort. The home office won’t be pleased.”
“Who was paying Evans?” Leila asked. “And paying him for what?”
“We’ll have to check on him,” Rand said. “But I suppose there are various pressures in today’s world working against disarmament. In America sometimes they’re called things like the military-industrial complex. In other nations they have other names. But they have money, and perhaps they’re taking over where some of the governments leave off. When we find out who was paying Evans, it might well be a company building rockets in America, or submarines in Russia, or fighter planes in France.”
“Is there no place left to escape?” Leila asked.
And Felix Bollinger supplied the answer. “No, my dear, there is not. Not even here, at the End of the Rainbow.”