The Chancellor Manuscript by Robert Ludlum Read Free Book Online Page B

loneliness; his eyes darted about, alert to real and imagined ills surrounding him.
    A favorite waiter was indisposed for the day; it was a personal affront. He let it be known.
    Fruit salad with a dome of cottage cheese in the center was marked for table ten. It was processed from the open, stainless steel shelf in the kitchen to the service counter. The blond-haired second assistant chef, temporarily employed, marked off the various trays, appraising their appearance with a practiced eye. He stood over table ten’s fruit salad, a clipboard in his hand, his gaze directed at the trays in front of it.
    Underneath the clipboard a pair of thin silver tongs were held horizontally. In the tongs’ teeth was a soft white capsule. The blond-haired man smiled at a harassed waiter coming through the dining-room door; at the same moment he plunged the silver tongs into the mound of cottage cheese beneath the clipboard, removed them, and moved on.
    Seconds later he returned to the order for table ten, shook his head, and touched up the dome of cottage cheese with a fork.
    Within the inserted capsule was a mild dose of lysergic acid diethylamide. The capsule would disintegrate and release the narcotic some seven to eight hours after the moment of ingestion.
    The minor stress and the disorientation that resulted would be enough. There would be no traces in the bloodstream at the time of death.
    The middle-aged woman sat in a windowless room. She listened to the voice coming out of the wall speakers, then repeated the words into the microphone of a tape machine. Her objective was to duplicate as closely as possible the now familiar voice from the speakers. Every slidingtone, every nuance, the idiosyncratic short pauses that followed the partially sibilant
s’
s.
    The voice coming from the speakers was that of Helen Gandy, for years the personal secretary of John Edgar Hoover.
    In the corner of the small studio stood two suitcases. Both were fully packed. In four hours the woman and the suitcases would be on a transatlantic flight bound for Zurich. It was the first leg of a trip that would eventually take her south to the Balearic Islands and a house on the sea in Majorca. But first there was Zurich, where the Staats-Banque would pay upon signature a negotiated sum into Barclays, which would in turn transfer the amount in two payments to an account at its branch in Palma. The first payment would be made immediately, the second in eighteen months.
    Varak had hired her. He believed that for every job there was a correct, skilled applicant. The computerized data banks at the National Security Council had been programed in secret, by Varak alone, until they produced the applicant he sought.
    She was a widow, a former radio actress. She and her husband had been caught in the crosscurrents of the Red Channels madness of 1954 and had never recovered. It was a madness sanctioned and aided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her husband, considered by many to have been a major talent, did not work for seven years. At the end of that time, his heart had burst in anguish. He had died in a subway station on his way to a clerical job at a downtown bank. By now the woman had been finished professionally for eighteen years; the pain and the rejection and the loneliness had robbed her of the ability to compete.
    There was no competition now. She was not told why she was doing what she was doing. Only that her brief conversation had to result in a “yes” on the other end of the line.
    The recipient of the call was a man the woman loathed with all her being. A basic accessory to the madness that had stolen her life.
    It was shortly past nine in the evening, and the telephone truck was not an uncommon sight on Thirtieth Street Place in northwest Washington. The short street wasa cul-de-sac, ending with the imposing gates of the Peruvian embassador’s residence, the national shield prominently displayed on the stone pillars. Two thirds of the way down