Program for a Puppet (12 page)

“You've been careful not to let me see you sign your name on the three occasions we've been at a restaurant…”

“You have it wrong.”

“Oh?” she said inquisitively. The romance seemed to have faded.

“Partly wrong. I have no wife or children. Not even a girl friend. My name is Graham.” He looked hard at her. “I am a journalist, but I don't make a living out of interviewing secretaries. I have an assignment, part of which is investigating the company you work for …”

“About what?”

“Smuggling.”

Françoise's expression was a mixture of surprise and disdain.

“So this …” she said, moving to the balcony, “and the dating—all a softening-up process?”

“No,” Graham said, annoyed with himself. “I really do want…”

She went to pick up her handbag. Graham held her gently. “Don't run off. Stay. Have another drink. Talk it out …”

Françoise looked annoyed but said nothing.

“Don't you see? Why would I tell you all this at this moment?”

Françoise stood staring at him for several seconds. “You say your name is Graham,” she said, puzzled.

The Australian nodded.

“Now I remember.” Her expression opened. “Your photo is filed in our office.” She sat on the bed. “You're Edwin Graham. You wrote that article about smuggling in Vienna.”

“Correct.”

“Yes,” she said reflectively, “it caused quite a stir. You're not very popular with my boss.”

Graham sat next to her. “Maybe you believe me now …”

“I am not sure … perhaps you should tell me exactly what you are doing.”

“And then you'll give me information?”

“I don't know until I hear your story.”

Graham's eyes searched her expression. “But if you run to your boss …”

She smiled triumphantly. “I suppose you would say the boots are on the other legs.”

“The boot is on the other foot …”

She laughed. “Pardon.”

“Yes. You're right. I must trust you….”

Graham was apprehensive. It was difficult to gauge her intentions. He would be gambling on her attraction to him.

“Okay,” he said slowly, as he leaned forward to kiss her, “I'll tell you all in the morning….”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” she said, pushing him gently away. “Now …”

Graham sighed and leaned back on the bed. He lit another cigarette and looked at her.

“You win …”

For the next twenty minutes he carefully outlined the salient points of the investigation without telling her anything that her company or Lasercomp would not already know he knew. Françoise sat, fascinated, occasionally asking him a question. Graham felt by her response that she was with him. But he was not sure.

At the end he said, “Now, can you tell me anything?”

She smiled mysteriously. “Maybe in the morning …”

They both laughed. Graham moved close and kissed her. Françoise slowly responded.

She looked at him with mock circumspection as they began to undress.

“You're really a spy, aren't you?”

“No. I am a journalist.”

“I've never made love to a spy … nor someone with such a hairy chest …”

They pulled back the bedclothes and lay beside each other, touching and kissing.

“Have you been in love?” Françoise asked.

“Yes, once.”

“Tell me about her.”

“She was the one … the one that was killed … I just told you about …”

“Oh, I am sorry. Tell me about your first …”

“I'm more interested in the next…”

First light squeezed through the half-open curtains and fell across Graham and Françoise.

Half an hour ago they had made love for the fourth time so vigorously that the bed was now a good foot clear of the wall it
had been hard up against before they started.

Her hand rested on his thickly matted chest which rose and fell to the gentle tempo of a light snore. She had time to reflect as she snuggled close to him.

At first she had been stunned by the fact that he had met her under false pretenses. But his eventual honesty and protestations during the night that his affections for her were genuine overcame her initial misgivings. Françoise was a great believer in the theory that a person could not deceive another about their feelings in bed. Certainly not repeatedly. She was also influenced by his telling her about his love and lingering emotion for Jane Ryder. That challenged her and warned her to be patient if the relationship was to develop. Françoise wanted to believe in him. He attracted her greatly.

When Graham awoke, he wandered into the kitchen, put on coffee and returned a few minutes later with two cups. She sat up in the bed and admired the magnificent morning view. Turning to him she said, “I want to help you. But you must promise not to involve me.”

Graham sipped his coffee. “You have my word. Don't worry.”

“Do you have a robe?”

The Australian took one from a clothes closet. She put it on and wandered out to the balcony. He followed her.

“Do you always come out here like that?” She laughed.

“Only the birds can see me,” he said, opening his arms to the trees. “I like to give them something to chirp at.”

“Exhibitionist.”

“You look at birds, don't you? They never wear clothes …” She went to kick him. Seconds later her expression changed as she said, “Apart from anything else, I want to give you information because Computer Increments' operations are, I think, crooked.”

“In what way?”

“They are heavily involved in some sort of smuggling chain—a link in a chain of middlemen moving computers into the Soviet Union.”

“Can you get me any written evidence of this?”

“Anything to do with contraband is under lock and key. Difficult to get hold of. Sometimes I see material. But everyone
there is very careful and secretive. Only occasionally there is a slip-up.”

“For instance?”

“A Russian from the Soviet trade mission here in London arrives unannounced on the doorstep every so often. It causes much embarrassment. He usually rings the office from a phone booth.”

“Name?”

“It starts with Z. I can easily find it for you.”

“Please.”

Graham walked into the bedroom, pulled a pair of jeans from a rack in a closet and hauled them on. “Your news is giving me goose pimples. Is there a file on this Russian?”

“Yes. It's hardly seen by anyone except my boss. He never lets anyone near it.”

“You mentioned links. What other companies is Computer Increments involved with?”

“Several.”

“The big ones …”

“The biggest is Lasercomp. The head of its Soviet marketing operations, a Frenchman I hate to say, named Cheznoir, and a German named Herman Znorel, met my boss a few weeks ago just after the Russian visited the office for the last time.”

“This is the sort of information I want. Cheznoir and Znorel, fantastic!”

“The whole office was jumping. My boss, a typically cool upper-class type of Englishman, was extremely nervous. They were both very important to him.”

“Any idea what the meeting was about?”

“Again, it was all kept very quiet. But my boss planned to visit the Soviet Union. I had to go to the Soviet Embassy for a visa. An itinerary was mapped out.”

“When is he going?”

“He's not. He has been very ill with a serious blood virus for the last week. It looks as if it's off indefinitely. He has dictated letters of apology over the phone from the hospital.”

“To whom?”

“Znorel in Stuttgart and Znorel's Soviet director in Moscow.”

“Hmmm. That's bad luck. He might have brought back
some important information you could have been on the lookout for.…

“Could I have some more coffee?”

Graham hastened to oblige. “Anything, dear lady, anything …”

He returned with the percolator, and a tape recorder. Switching the tape on, he said, “I think we better get all this down…. What's your boss's name?”

“Harold Clarence Radford….”

Brogan Senior was annoyed at the slow progress being made in the efforts to smear Rickard. On the morning of Sunday, September 7, the Old Man stepped off his private jet after a brief visit to the Soviet Union and was immediately chauffeur-driven straight to Hitchcock Presbyterian Church in Scarsdale, New York. There he knew he would find Huntsman and most of Lasercomp's senior management. They were all aware of the Brogans' strong family religious tradition going back long before his grandfather, John Clifford Brogan, and his family of five had been driven by poverty from Scotland to Ireland and finally to the U.S. in 1840.

In the eighty-five-minute drive the Old Man briefed himself fully on the PPP via a small terminal in the back of the Rolls, and had time to view a cassette replay of the Rickard-MacGregor debate.

Outside the church, after a string of deferential nods from Lasercomp people, Brogan Senior spotted the PR man and pulled him aside.

“I watched the replay of the Rickard-MacGregor interview this morning. It wasn't good enough, Alan.”

“To my mind, MacGregor and Mineva acquitted themselves well,” Huntsman said defensively.

“No, they did not!” the Old Man said vehemently. “Philpott should have called the shots as chairman. Instead, he let Rickard get right on top! I thought you said Philpott was with us. You spoke to him last week, didn't you?”

“Yes, but, C.B., it was an open debate. He had to handle three interviewers. Rickard is skilled at handling open debates. No one could control him.”

“All right. It was difficult for Philpott. But his failure to
embarrass Rickard highlights a weakness in our efforts to get him out of office.”

The Old Man nodded to an executive making sure he was seen moving into the church. “We must step up our efforts. A lot more has to be done. By tomorrow night you'll have PPP directives involving certain media personnel. You will not have to rely simply on Philpott. You have to go right to the top. To the network presidents. To people such as Cary Bilby.”

Huntsman's flesh crawled. The old bastard was going to push all the way.

Brogan sighed. “I don't want you telling me there is no way of getting to him. We've got to have him on our side to crush Rickard.” The tone of his voice hinted that he knew there was a way. “Once we have an important network president convinced our cause is right, the TV programming might come out a little differently.”

“I know we need the media, but—”

“No buts, man!” the Old Man said, glowering as they moved into the church. “What the hell do you think we hired you for?” he sneered. “Your good looks?” He fumbled for his wallet in an inside coat pocket. “You're supposed to know all the skeletons. Dig them up and earn that goddamn three hundred thousand dollars I pay you!”

The Old Man placed two fifty-dollar bills on a plate and found a seat in a front aisle.

FBS President Cary Bilby did not know how to take what had just been said to him by Huntsman. His former colleague had just attempted to blackmail him over an issue he believed had been buried twenty years ago. It concerned a love letter Bilby had written. The problem was that the recipient happened to be a man, Douglas Philpott. Bilby was bisexual. He had kept his homosexual experience discreet, but the appearance of the golden-haired young Philpott changed all that. For the first time he hadn't cared what others thought.

The TV superstar was ambitious about reaching the top, and prepared to do anything to get there. After a cautious first few months, the two became more adventurous and were seen together at the racetrack, on vacation in Paris and Honolulu, and at private parties. It lasted about a year before the odd rumor began
to fly around Washington media circles. Philpott, frightened that it could end rather than enhance his career, was soon involved in a mild flirtation with a Washington female gossip columnist. Bilby had reluctantly agreed to split. But Philpott's callousness in dropping the affair so quickly had hurt him. Bilby wrote several rambling, impassioned letters.

Philpott was enjoying his return to a straight path and after six months threw the gossip columnist out of his apartment and planned to replace her with a film starlet. His face and name were getting any woman he wanted. When he asked the columnist to leave, she produced one of Bilby's epistles that she had taken from Philpott's private files and photocopied.

In desperation, Philpott had turned to Huntsman. With priestlike sobriety and inner relish, he went into action. Through his many connections, he persuaded the girl with a mixture of bribery, cajolery and veiled threat to surrender the letter for a handsome payoff and a better job. At the same time, he warned Cary Bilby to be more discreet and urged him to cover his wavering sexual tracks by getting married.

Bilby took the advice, and within six months was walking down the aisle with an attractive young New York socialite. The incident was forgotten and both Bilby and Philpott believed Huntsman had destroyed the only evidence of the affair. They had seen him burn the letter in question. Now he was revealing he still had written evidence.

“What has that corporation done to you, Alan?” Bilby asked, his fine, sensitive features quivering with emotion.

Huntsman ran a finger round a sticky collar. “Cary, I was hoping to avoid the letter business,” he said with an anguished look, “but we really want Rickard out. It's best for the nation.”

“I cannot do it,” Bilby almost whispered.

Huntsman shook his head. Fumbling in an inside coat pocket, he pulled out a folded paper and tossed it on the desk. Bilby looked at it in disbelief. It was a photostat.

The FBS president's eyes widened as he unfolded it. “You never said you copied it,” he said incredulously.