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Senator Bennett Hapgood rose at his appointed time on the floor of the Senate and strode to the podium. The day after the funeral of Simon Cormack both houses of Congress had once again put on the record their shock and revulsion at what had happened on a lonely roadside far away in England the previous week.
Speaker after speaker had called for action to trace the culprits and bring them to justice, American justice, no matter what the cost. The President pro tem of the Senate hammered with his gavel.
“The junior senator from Oklahoma has the floor,” he intoned.
Bennett Hapgood was not known as a heavyweight within the Senate. The session might have been thinly attended but for the matter under discussion. It was not thought the junior senator from Oklahoma would have much more to add. But he did. He uttered the habitual words of condolence to the President, revulsion at what had happened, and eagerness to see the guilty brought to justice. Then he paused and considered what he was about to say.
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 67th Street 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, cannot function without a host of secretaries, stenographers, clerks, messengers, any one of whom can leak a confidential document.
“One thing is certain,” mused Stannard of Defense. “After this, the Nantucket Treaty is dead as a dodo. We have to review our defense appropriations now on the basis that there will be no reductions, no limits at all.”
Quinn had begun trawling the bars in the maze of narrow streets running off Schipperstraat. He was there by ten that evening and stayed till the bars closed just before dawn, a rangy seaman who seemed half drunk, spoke slurred French, and nursed a small beer in bar after bar. It was cold outside and the thinly clad prostitutes shivered over their electric heaters behind their windows. Sometimes they came off shift, pulled on a coat, and scuttled down the pavement to one of the bars for a drink and the usual exchange of crude pleasantries with the barman and regulars.
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.
Quinn had told Sam she would have to wait, either at the hotel or in the car parked two corners away on Falcon Rui. She chose the car, which did not prevent her receiving a fair share of propositions through the windows.
Quinn sat and drank slowly, watching the surging tide of locals and foreigners that ebbed in and out of these streets and their bars. On his left hand, picked out in India ink from the art shop, slightly smudged to give the impression of age, was the motif of the black spider’s web, the bright red spider at its center. All night he scanned other left hands but saw nothing like it.
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 grinned: “Back again, no luck?”
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 running to keep the heater on.
“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 Quinn might have been tempted by some of the girls and their outfits on display in Schipperstraat. He was not, but saw no reason to disabuse her.
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 associ
ates 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.
