Ten From Infinity | Page 5

her good-bye, went down the twelve floors in the
elevator, and hurried out of the building.
There was no cab in sight and he began to walk. Half a block later he
turned a corner and stopped dead. He was facing a man who was
coming in the other direction. He stared. The man stared back. Frank
automatically stepped aside, but the man did exactly the same thing, at
the same time, and they did a little dance there on the sidewalk. Then
the man veered around him and moved on up the street. Frank turned
and stared after him, then walked slowly in his own direction.
It was the same man. It was the Park Avenue hit. It was the man he'd

left in Ward Five with a broken leg. It wasn't a brother or a cousin or a
chance resemblance. It was the man himself or an exact double. And
what were the percentages against attending a patient one night and
meeting his exact double on the street the next morning?
They were fantastic. Like hitting the Irish sweeps.
It was the man. It had to be.
Except that he wasn't broken-legged now. He was walking across the
Upper East Side, wearing that same look that was as good as anyone
else's, except that you got the impression of an emptiness behind his
eyes.

2
Those in the know in Washington, D.C., upon seeing Brent Taber rush
to a taxi or dodge a pedestrian on Pennsylvania Avenue, could well say,
"There walks power." But there were few indeed who possessed
enough knowledge of the Washington inner structure to be able to
make this observation.
Brent looked more like a coal heaver than a public servant with a
well-oiled escalator into the White House. He appeared more able to
direct a gang of dock workers than to jockey a delicate issue through
the bloody jungle of national politics. Many of the people who accepted
this deception did so at their peril and were not around any more. To
others not so foolish, Brent Taber symbolized a completely necessary
facet of a working democracy--secret government. This necessity
sprang from the realization that even an open society must maintain
areas of privacy or it is doomed.
Such was the man, and such was his mission of the moment--an issue
of the utmost secrecy. So hush-hush, in fact, was this mission that when
Brent Taber arrived at his office that morning and found Senator Crane
pacing his reception-room carpet, his heavy eyebrows gathered and he
began mentally checking his "tight ship" for a leak.

Senator Crane was the exact opposite of Brent, in that he looked to be
exactly what he was; a figure rigidly type-cast to the role of a blustering,
tactless servant of the people. Which, in Crane's case, meant that he
was a servant of Crane's career and any faction of his supporters that
could further it. Still, the Senator could not be called dishonest. He was
merely a flexible rationalizer. He sincerely believed that what was good
for Crane was good for the "folks back home."
And just now, he felt that a knowledge of what the hell was going on in
Brent Taber's orbit was probably not good for anybody and had better
be aired.
As Brent entered, Crane came right to the point. "Goddamn it, Taber,
just what in blazes is going on around here?"
Brent's thick lips hardly moved, a characteristic that Crane found
infuriating because that was the way shady characters talked into
Senatorial investigation microphones and it looked pretty bad. But
Brent's words came quite clear: "Routine business, Senator--an honest
effort to get a day's work done."
"You mean to tell me the meeting that's been set up here is routine?"
Brent shrugged. "Meetings are meetings, Senator."
Crane ticked it off on his fat fingers. "Pender of the Army, Bright of the
Navy, Jones of the Air Force, Hagen of the FBI, Wilson from
Treasury--they all trooped through here into your private conference
room." He pointed pompously at his own chest. "But Crane of the
Senate--"
"You forgot Birch of the State Department," Brent cut in. "Or hasn't he
arrived yet?"
"--Crane of the Senate is barred! Now just what in the hell--?"
There are times for tact and times for bluntness, and this was a time,
Brent decided, for the latter. "What goes on here, Senator," he said, "is

none of your business. Otherwise, you would have been invited."
Crane's face darkened and Brent thought pleasantly of a brain
hemorrhage blowing the top of his fat head off. But this was too much
to hope for.
"Brent," Crane exploded, "I'll get you! So help me, I'll get you! Just
who the hell do you think you are--demeaning the dignity of the United
States Senate?