The Icarus Agenda

'Don't tell your husband,' offered Kendrick, chuckling.

'Oh, but I did. All he said was that he'd buy the airline tickets. Of course, he and Weingrass got drunk a couple of times—’

'Got drunk? I didn't even know they'd met.'

'My fault—to my undying regret. It was when you flew to Denver about eight months ago—'

'I remember. The state conference, and Manny was still in the hospital. I asked you to go see him, take him the Paris Tribune.'

'And I brought Paddy with me during the evening visiting hours. I'm no centrefold, but even I'm not walking these streets at night, and the TT cop's got to be good for something.'

'What happened?'

'They got along like a shot and a beer. I had to work late one night that week and Paddy insisted on going to the hospital himself.'

Evan shook his head slowly. 'I'm sorry, Annie. I never knew. I didn't mean to involve you and your husband in my private life. And Manny never told me.'

'Probably the Listerine bottles.'

The what?'

'Same colour as light Scotch. I'll get him on the phone.'

Emmanuel Weingrass leaned against the formation of rock on top of a hill belonging to Kendrick's 30-acre spread at the base of the mountains. His short-sleeved checked shirt was unbuttoned to the waist as he took the sun, breathing the clear air of the southern Rockies. He glanced at his chest, at the scars of the surgery, and wondered for a brief moment whether he should believe in God or in Evan Kendrick. The doctors had told him—months after the operation and numerous post-op checkups—that they had cut out the dirty little cells that were eating his life away. He was clean, they pronounced. Pronounced to a man who, on this day, on this rock, was eighty years of age with the sun beating down on his frail body. Frail and not so frail, for he moved better, spoke better—coughed practically not at all. Yet he missed his Gauloise cigarettes and the Monte Cristo cigars he enjoyed so much. So what could they do? Stop his life a few weeks or months before a logical ending?

He looked over at his nurse in the shade of a nearby tree next to the ever-present golf cart. She was one of the round-the-clock females who accompanied him everywhere, and he wondered what she would do if he propositioned her while leaning casually against the boulder. Such potential responses had always intrigued him but generally the reality merely amused him.

'Beautiful day, isn't it?' he called out.

'Simply gorgeous,' was the reply.

'What do you say we take all our clothes off and really enjoy it?'

The nurse's expression did not change for an instant. Her response was calm, deliberate, even gentle. 'Mr. Weingrass, I'm here to look after you, not give you cardiac arrest.'

'Not bad. Not bad at all.'

The radio telephone on the golf cart hummed; the woman walked over to it and snapped it out of its recess. After a brief conversation capped with quiet laughter, she turned to Manny. 'The congressman's calling you, Mr. Weingrass.'

'You don't laugh like that with a congressman,' said

Manny, pushing himself away from the rock. 'Five'll get you twenty it's Annie Glocamorra telling lies about me.'

'She did ask if I'd strangled you yet.' The nurse handed the phone to Weingrass.

'Annie, this woman's a letch!'

'We try to be of service,' said Evan Kendrick.

'Boy, that girl of yours gets off the phone pretty damned quick.'

'Forewarned, forearmed, Manny. You called. Is everything all right?'

'I should only call in a crisis?'

'You rarely call, period. That privilege is almost exclusively mine. What is it?'

'You got any money left?'

'I can't spend the interest. Sure. Why?'

'You know the addition we built on the west porch so you got a view?'

'Of course.'

'I've been playing with some sketches. I think you should have a terrace on top. Two steel beams would carry the load; maybe a third if you went for a glass-blocked steam bath by the wall.'

'Glass-blocked…? Hey, that sounds terrific. Go ahead.'

'Good. I've got the plumbers coming out in the morning. But when it's done, then I go back to Paris.'

'Whatever you say, Manny. However, you said you'd work up some plans for a gazebo down by the streams, where they merge.'

'You said you didn't want to walk that far.'

'I've changed my mind. It would be a good place for a person to get away and think.'

'That excludes the owner of this establishment.'

'You're all heart. I'm coming back next week for a few days.'

'I can't wait,' said Weingrass, raising his voice and looking over at the nurse. 'When you get here, you can take these heavy-breathing sex maniacs off my hands!'

It was shortly past 10:00 pm when Milos Varak walked down the deserted hallway in the House Office Building. He had been admitted by pre-arrangement, a late night visitor of one Congressman Arvin Partridge of Alabama. Varak reached the heavy wooden door with the brass plate centred in the sculptured panel and knocked. Within seconds it was opened by a slender man in his early twenties whose eyes looked out anxiously from large tortoiseshell glasses. Whoever he was, he was not the gruff, savvy chairman of the Partridge 'Gang', that investigative committee determined to find out why the armed services were getting so little for so much. Not in terms of $1,200 toilet seats and $700 pipe wrenches; those were too blatant to be taken seriously and might even be correctable diversions. What concerned the 'Birds'—another sobriquet—were the 500 per cent overruns and the restricted degree of competitive bidding in defence contracts. What they had only begun to uncover, of course, was a river of corruption with so many tributaries there weren't enough scouts to pursue them in the canoes available.

'I'm here to see Congressman Partridge,' said the blond man, his Czech accent not lost on but conceivably misconstrued by the slender young man at the door.

'Did you…?' began the apparent congressional aide awkwardly. 'I mean when you saw the guards downstairs—'

'If you're asking me whether or not I was checked for firearms, of course I was, and you should know it. They called you from Security. The congressman, please. He's expecting me.'

'Certainly, sir. He's in his office. This way, sir.' The nervous aide led Milos to a second large, dark door. The younger man knocked. 'Congressman—'

'Tell him to come in!' ordered the loud Southern voice from inside. 'And you stay out there and take any calls. I don't care if it's the Speaker or the President, I'm not here!'

'Go right in,' said the aide, opening the door.

Varak was tempted to tell the agitated young man that he was a friendly liaison from the KGB, but decided against it. The aide was there for a reason; few phone calls came to the House Office Building at this hour. Milos stepped inside the large ornate room with the profusion of photographs on the desk, walls and tables, all in one way or another attesting to Partridge's influence, patriotism, and power. The man himself, standing by a curtained window, was not as impressive as he appeared in the photographs. He was short and overweight, with a puffed, angry face below a large head of thinning dyed hair.

'Ah don't know what you're sellin', Blondie,' said the congressman walking forward like an enraged pigeon, 'but if it's what I think it is, I'll take you down so fast you'll wish you had a parachute.'

'I'm not selling anything, sir, I'm giving something away. Something of considerable value, in fact.'

'Muleshit! You want some kind of fuckin' cover-up and I'm not givin' it!'

'My clients seek no cover-up and certainly I don't. But I submit, Congressman, you may.'