Chase helped himself to a whiskey and soda. He switched on the giant TV from the remote-control device on the bar and sat down in a nearby armchair, thinking it an odd time--one-thirty in the afternoon --to be addressing the General Assembly. Then he recalled that the speech was being transmitted live. In Europe it would be timed just right for the early-evening newscast, while on the West Coast it was midmorning. Obviously, Ingrid Van Dorn was hoping to capture the biggest possible worldwide audience.
A huge brown face on the screen was mouthing introductory platitudes. Chase couldn't decide whether he was a fawning delegate or an unctuous TV anchorman until a four-foot-wide caption came up:
Chase hardly listened as Senor Messina spoke on and on.
He finished his drink and went to the bar for another one. He normally never drank during the day, but there were exceptions to every rule, today apparently being one of them. Of course he knew why. He should have told Cheryl where the money was coming from and he'd chickened out. She had a right to know the truth. Their relationship from the start had been totally honest, and now he had betrayed that trust.
As he added a splash of soda he heard the door click and glanced around, expecting it to be Prothero. Anything less like Prothero it would have been impossible to imagine.
The youth was hunched, deformed, his head shaved so that the bumps and faint blue veins were rather obscenely displayed. He wore ridiculous bent wire-frame spectacles hooked over pale flapping ears, and his eyes, moist and bulging, were magnified grotesquely. White scrawny arms extended from loose black robes, one bony fist gripping the door knob.
Chase and this apparition stared in silence at each other for several long moments. From the TV came the polite rippling of applause as Senor Jose J. Messina ended his speech and the face of Ingrid Van Dorn appeared on the screen, as big as a billboard. The youth turned his head mechanically toward it, pale knife-blade features expressionless, protruding eyes immobile and unblinking.
There was something reptilian about him, scaly and cold-blooded, that sent a shiver down Chase's spine. He almost expected to see a forked tongue flick out from the slit of a mouth.
The door closed and Chase was left alone with the image of Ingrid Van Dorn and the sound of her husky voice. But he wasn't really listening: He was thinking hard, trying to remember. What was the name of that religious sect? He'd heard of them before. The Faith. So what was one of them doing here, today of all days, wandering around the UN building? A hunchback kid in black robes . . .
Chase discovered that he was holding the soda bottle. It felt clammy in his hand. He put it down and ran to the door. The corridor was empty. In the distance he could hear the amplified voice of the secretary-general. His thoughts were racing too fast for his brain to keep up with them. An instinct, a gut reaction made the sweat break out all over his body. He became possessed of a morbid fantastic fear concerning that kid in the black robes, his unemotional and deadly purposeful-ness, those cold dead eyes behind the bent wire-frame spectacles.
Chase went to the telephone, punched the operator's button, and asked to be connected to the secretary-general's office. He waited, fist clenching, opening, clenching again. Senator Prothero, he was informed, had left with Madam Van Dorn for the General Assembly thirty minutes ago. From there he was to have met someone in the Kurt Waldheim hospitality suite.
Chase slammed the receiver down and stood looking at but not seeing the TV screen. In the corridor he turned toward the sound of the distantly echoing voice. His stride lengthened into a run. He turned a corner directed by a blue plastic arrow and leaped up a carpeted stairway, three at a time. Prothero was in the main chamber, had to be, and there at least he was safe, in full view of the assembly and the world's media. Nothing could happen to him there, surely not in front of all those watching billions. It was inconceivable. Wasn't it? A pyro-assassination attempt there?
Oh, please, God, pray he was wrong.
He turned a corner and stumbled up a short inclined tunnel that ended in black empty space. Sweat stung his eyes. He blinked it away, the lights in the domed ceiling fragmenting into splintered stars. The voice of Ingrid Van Dorn boomed loudly in his ears. To his left were rank after rank of white blobs fading into darkness. To his right and a little above him, Ingrid Van Dorn stood in the converging beams of a dozen spotlights, surrounded by microphones. Behind her was the UN crest in bas-relief. Behind and above that, on the upper dais, sat several rows of VIPs and UN officials.
