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By Root 703 0

What if they lie to themselves? If I were an examiner for the SEC, I think I could put a whole lot of guys in Allenwood Federal Prison. What they say they have doesn't jibe with what we can identify them as actually having. Their economy is teetering, and if that goes bad, even a little bit, the whole shebang comes down."

"How could we exploit that?" Ritter asked. His own blue-team analysis had said something very similar four days earlier, but even Judge Moore didn't know that.

"Where do they get their hard currency—I mean, what do they get it from?"

"Oil." Greer answered the question. The Russians exported as much oil as the Saudis.

"And who controls the world price of oil?"

"OPEC?"

"And who," Ryan went on, "controls OPEC?"

"The Saudis."

"Aren't they our friends?" Jack concluded. "Look at the USSR as a takeover target, like we did at Merrill Lynch. The assets are worth a lot more than the parent corporation, because it's so badly run. This isn't hard stuff to figure out." Even by a guy exhausted by a long day, five thousand miles of air travel, and a little too much booze, he didn't add. There were a lot of smart people at CIA, but they thought too much like government workers, and not enough like Americans. "Don't we have anybody who thinks outside the box?"

"Bob?" Moore asked.

Ritter was warming to the young analyst by the minute. "Ryan, you ever read Edgar Allan Poe?"

"In high school," Ryan replied in some small confusion.

"How about a story called 'The Masque of the Red Death?"

"Something about a plague coming in to ruin the party, wasn't it?"

"Get some rest. Before you fly back to London tomorrow, you're going to get briefed in on something."

"Sleep sounds like a plan, gentlemen. Where do I crash for the night?" he asked, letting them know, if they hadn't already guessed, that he was ready to collapse.

"We have a place for you at the Marriott up the road. You're all checked in. There's a car waiting at the entrance for you. Go on, now," Moore told him.

"Maybe he's not so dumb after all," Ritter speculated.

"Robert, it's nice to see that you're strong enough to change," Greer smilingly observed as he reached for Moore's own office bottle of expensive bourbon whiskey. It was time to celebrate.

* * *

THE FOLLOWING DAY in Il Tempo, a morning newspaper in Rome, was a story about a man found dead in a car of an apparent heart attack. It would be a little time before the body was identified and it was finally determined that he was a Bulgarian tourist who'd evidently come to the end of his life quite unexpectedly. How clear his conscience had been was not apparent from physical examination.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

RUMBLINGS AND DREAMS

CHAPTER 2

VISIONS AND HORIZONS

CHAPTER 3

EXPLORATIONS

CHAPTER 4

INTRODUCTIONS

CHAPTER 5

GETTING CLOSE

CHAPTER 6

BUT NOT TOO CLOSE

CHAPTER 7

SIMMERING

CHAPTER 8

THE DISH

CHAPTER 9

SPIRITS

CHAPTER 10

BOLT FROM THE BLUE

CHAPTER 11

HAND JIVE

CHAPTER 12

HANDOFF

CHAPTER 13

COLLEGIALITY

CHAPTER 14

DANGER SIGNAL

CHAPTER 15

MEETING PLACE

CHAPTER 16

A FUR HAT FOR THE WINTER

CHAPTER 17

FLASH TRAFFIC

CHAPTER 18

CLASSICAL MUSIC

CHAPTER 19

CLEAR SIGNAL

CHAPTER 20

STAGING

CHAPTER 21

VACATION

CHAPTER 22

PROCUREMENTS AND ARRANGEMENTS

CHAPTER 23

ALL ABOARD

CHAPTER 24

ROLLING HILLS

CHAPTER 25

EXCHANGING THE BODIES

CHAPTER 26

TOURISTS

CHAPTER 27

RABBIT RUN

CHAPTER 28

BRITISH MIDLANDS

CHAPTER 29

REVELATION

CHAPTER 30

FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATER

CHAPTER 31

BRIDGE BUILDER

CHAPTER 32

MASQUED BALL