e 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,