It would all take six or seven minutes.
He would then return to Trevayne’s office, passing the secretary once again—this time complimenting her on her dress or her hair or whatever—and walk to the armchair by the window.
But he would not read the paper nor sit in the chair.
Instead he would go to the file cabinet on the right wall and open it. He would select the drawer that held the G’s.
Genessee Industries, Palo Alto, California.
He would extract the folder, close the drawer, and return to the chair. He would have a safe maximum of fifteen minutes to make notes before replacing the information.
The entire operation would take less than twenty-five minutes, and there would be only one moment of risk. If Trevayne’s secretary or a staff member walked in while the cabinet was open. In that event he would have to say he found it open and pass his actions off casually as «curiosity.»
But of course the cabinet would never have been open; it was always locked. Always.
Major Paul Bonner would unlock it with a key given him by Brigadier General Lester Cooper.
It was all a question of priorities; and Bonner felt sick to his stomach.
15
Trevayne rushed up the steps of the Capitol Building, conscious of the fact that he had been followed. He knew it, because he had made two out-of-the-way stops from his office to the center of town: at a bookstore on Rhode Island Avenue, where the traffic was slight, and a spur-of-the-moment detour to Georgetown, Ambassador Hill’s residence. The Ambassador wasn’t home.
On Rhode Island Avenue he’d noticed a gray Pontiac sedan maneuver into a parking space half a block behind him—heard the Pontiac’s rear tires scraping the curb.
Twenty minutes later, as he had walked to the front door of Hill’s Georgetown house, he had heard the bells of a knife-sharpening truck, a small van driving slowly down the cobblestone street soliciting business from the uniformed maids. He had smiled, thinking the sight an anachronism, a throwback to his teen-age Boston memories.
Then he saw it again; there was the gray Pontiac. It was behind the slow-moving van, its driver obviously annoyed; the street was narrow, and the small truck was not accommodating. The Pontiac was unable to pass.
As Trevayne reached the top of the Capitol’s steps he made a mental note to check with Webster at the White House. Perhaps Webster had assigned separate guards for him, although such precautions were unnecessary. Not that he was brave; he was simply too well known a figure now, and he rarely traveled alone. This afternoon was an exception.
He turned on the last step and looked down at the street. The gray Pontiac wasn’t in sight, but there were dozens of automobiles—some parked, with drivers inside, some moving slowly past. Any one of them might have been radioed from Georgetown.
He entered the building and went immediately to the information desk. It was almost four o’clock, and he was expected at the office of National District Statistics before the end of the day. He wasn’t sure what the N.D.S. information would prove, if, indeed, he could extract any information to begin with, but it was another alley, another possible connection between seemingly unrelated facts.
National District Statistics was a computerized laboratory that more logically should have been housed at Treasury. That it wasn’t was merely another inconsistency in this town of contradictions, thought Trevayne. National District Statistics kept up-to-the-month records of regional employment directly affected by government projects. It duplicated the work of a dozen other offices but was somewhat different in the sense that its information was general; «projects» included everything from partial payment of state highways to federal participation in school construction. From aircraft factories to the renovation of park areas. In other words, it was a catch-all for explaining the allocation of tax money, and as such was used incessantly, prodigiously, by politicians justifying their existences. The figures could, of course, be broken down into categories, if one preferred, but that was rarely the case. The totals were always more impressive than their collective parts.
As he neared the N.D.S. door, Trevayne reconsidered the logic of its location; it was, after all, quite proper that N.D.S. be close to the offices of those who needed it most.
In essence, why he was there.
Trevayne put the papers down on the table. It was a few minutes after five, and he’d been reading in the small cubicle for nearly an hour. He rubbed his eyes and saw that one of the minor custodians was looking through the glass-paneled door; it was past closing, and the clerk was anxious to shut the office and leave. Trevayne would give him a ten-dollar bill for the delay.
It was a ludicrous exchange. Information involving—at a rough estimate—two hundred and thirty million for the gratuity of ten dollars.
But there it was—two increases of 148 million and 82 million respectively. Each increase predominantly the result of defense contracts—coded as «DF» in the schedules; both «unexpected,» if Trevayne’s newspaper reading was accurate. Sudden windfalls for each constituency.
Yet both had been predicted with incredible accuracy by the two candidates running for reelection in their respective states.
California and Maryland.
Senators Armbruster and Weeks. The short, compact pipe-smoking Armbruster. And Alton Weeks, the polished aristocrat from Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Armbruster had faced a tough challenger for his incumbency. Northern California’s unemployment was dangerously, if temporarily, high, and the polls indicated that his opponent’s attacks on Armbruster’s failure to garner government contracts were having an effect on the voters. Armbruster, in the last days of the campaign, suddenly injected a subtle note that probably turned the election in his favor. He insinuated that he was in the process of obtaining defense money in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty million. A figure which even the state economists admitted was sufficient to prime the pumps of the state’s northern recovery.
Weeks: also an incumbent, but faced not so much by competition as by a campaign deficit. Money was tight in the Maryland coffers, and the prestigious Weeks family reluctant to underwrite the entirety. According to the Baltimore Sun, Alton Weeks met privately with a number of Maryland’s leading business figures and told them Washington’s purse strings were loosening. They could be assured of a minimum of eighty million directed into Maryland’s industrial economy… Weeks’s campaign resources were suddenly substantial.
Yet the election of both senators had taken place six months prior to each allocation. And although it was possible that both men had been huddling with defense appropriations, it wasn’t logical that they could have been so precise as to the amounts. Not unless arrangements were made; arrangements more concerned with politics than with national security.
And both senators dealt with the same Defense contractor.
Genessee Industries.
Armbruster funded developments in Genessee’s new high-altitude Norad interceptors, a questionable project from the outset.
Weeks had managed to finance an equally suspect undertaking with a Maryland subsidiary of Genessee’s. A coastal radar network improvement «justified» by two isolated aircraft penetrating the coastal screen several years ago.