Ten From Infinity | Page 5

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? Just who are you to say what the people should or should not know?"
"Decisions of that nature are made upstairs, Senator. I don't presume to possess the judgment needed in such matters."
"You're an arrogant bureaucrat! Your kind comes and goes because when you get too goddamned arrogant the people rise up in their wrath and knock you off."
Marcia Holly, Brent's secretary, was studiously transcribing some notes and Brent turned his scowl on her because, damn it, she was laughing like hell at the whole thing. And, by God, a secretary didn't have the right to laugh at a United States Senator, even with her eyes, no matter how much a congenital idiot he was.
"I'm sorry, Senator," Brent said. "If you have a complaint, please take it up with my superiors. Just now I--"
"Your superiors? And who the devil are they? Who can find them? Where do they have offices? Go around trying to find your superiors and