There would be a midafternoon luncheon. Perez-Blasco and Fairlie would share the dais alone; was that acceptable to McNeely? Perez-Blasco would introduce the honored guest—here, a copy of the brief welcoming speech Perez-Blasco would deliver. Then Fairlie would make a brief address; was it possible for Torres to obtain a copy of that now? Then the dignitaries and reporters would be ushered elsewhere; Fairlie and the Spanish chief executive would retire with their aides for private discussions.…

On cue, Clifford Fairlie came down the wide stairs in his lounging jacket, the one with elbow patches, all smiles; shook hands warmly all around, sat down and chatted.

The protocols were observed and finally Torres was leaving. They all emerged from the hotel onto the deck and McNeely smiled vaguely at the chopper pilot when they walked past the helicopter toward the steps. The Secret Service men were scanning the corners, the shadows, the mountainside, even the sky; they were paid to do only one thing and they did it professionally.

Fairlie and Torres and the entourage descended to the pavement. The limousine drew up, Guardianos coming to attention. Later, trying to recall the exact sequence of events, McNeely had a great deal of difficulty sorting out the movements he had seen. The press car drove up behind Torres’s limousine; the aides and guards got inside while Torres and Dominguez said goodbye—this after the usual nonstatements to the press pool: the discussions have been very useful, everything is going smoothly, we look forward to a frank exchange of views in Madrid.…

Several hotel employees had come along to the edge of the deck to watch. The chopper pilot and copilot were there, smoking cigarettes, looking at their watches, somewhat bored. Now Torres and his people were inside the stretched-out car. It was a vehicle designed for its times. Two-way radios, bulletproof glass, door locks that could be opened only from the inside. In the era of political kidnappings the technology of security was elaborate. A hard glass screen ascended from the top of the front seat and sealed itself shut with a click against the ceiling; Torres, leaning forward in his rear seat, waved and smiled and spoke through the open door before it chunked shut and the stately car slid quietly away down the mountain road.

The Navy pilots were wandering back to the chopper on the deck when McNeely and Fairlie reached the platform; McNeely later remembered that much. The pool of journalists was dispersing after unsuccessfully trying to pump the President-elect.

Fairlie was heading for the stairs inside the hotel, the Secret Service agents clustering around like sheepdogs. No, McNeely thought, like barnacles. That was going to try Fairlie’s patience: Fairlie liked room, he liked to spread out, he didn’t like people being in his way. He was a man to whom occasions of solitude were important. He’s going to have to learn.

McNeely stood on the deck near the helicopter. What if, he thought, and began to envisage a sniper with a high-powered rifle peering through a telescopic sight from one of the high timber patches.… Assassination was always so easy. If a man really intended to murder you there was only one way on earth to stop him: kill him first. And if you didn’t know who he was, didn’t even know of his existence—you had no chances at all.

Morbid thoughts. It was a place that gave rise to them: the mausoleum atmosphere of the huge empty hotel; the yellow-gray sky with sunlight hardly filtering through; the chill dry breeze, the immutable detachment of the mountain.

Later he wondered if he had been experiencing a premonition gone slightly awry: some sort of ESP, prescience, an unusual sensitivity to the portentousness of that day. He was never to give it very much credence; after all there was no sniper.

He turned toward the door, minding the chill, thinking about going into his room for an hour’s work. But solitude was not McNeely’s milieu; he worked best in the midst of noise and confusion. The great empty rooms would depress him and he would only fling himself outdoors again, and so he did not go inside at all.

Instead he engaged the two chopper pilots in small talk. They were Navy officers—easy to converse with; they had been chosen for their mannerliness and appearance as well as their aeronautical skill. McNeely himself had started building model airplanes at the age of nine and the fascination had never left him.

“… forty-five-foot rotor. Horsepower? Close to a thou, she’ll cruise at one-thirty. We’ll make Madrid easy this afternoon, hundred and thirty-five minutes, forty-five minutes’ fuel to spare.”

“Usually they use the Thirteen-Jay for this kind of thing, don’t they?”

“Usually. But that’s a smaller machine, it hasn’t got the ceiling of this bird.” Anderson spoke with proprietary pride.

The chopper was a Bell Iroquois, HU-1J, with VIP accommodations for six passengers in comfort; she had the Navy’s blue paint job and stenciled Sixth Fleet markings. McNeely ignored the nibblings of his conscience while he killed nearly an hour chatting with Anderson and Cord about choppers and missions.

The two pilots were ten-year veterans whose seams and creases were not in their faces but in their worn leather flight jackets. They said “hep” for help and “thank” for think and they talked in a technological jargon that annihilated human communication; they had the kind of minds which McNeely despised in the collective sense—the Silent Sophomority, Muddle Americans—but they were good likable men and McNeely was not a man to let philosophical principle get in the way of human pleasures.

Guilt finally goaded him toward the papers in his room. He left the pilots on the deck drinking coffee out of thermoses.

He made the final cuts and changes in the speech Fairlie would deliver this afternoon and then he showered and changed into a gray Dunhill suit and walked along the mezzanine to Fairlie’s room.

Fairlie was on the phone with Jeanette; he waved McNeely to a chair.

When Fairlie rang off McNeely said, “My God that’s disgusting.”

“What is?”

“All that billing and cooing at your age.”

Fairlie just grinned. He was in the chair beside the phone in a Madras dressing gown; now, when he began to get out of his seat, he seemed to go on rising for an incredible length of time—a tall multijointed man unfolding himself hinge by hinge.

They talked while Fairlie dressed: about Perez-Blasco, about Brewster, about the Capitol bombing, about the U. S. Air Force bases at Torrejon and Saragossa and the Navy base at Rota.

Perez-Blasco was the Messiah, the Judas; the beloved savior of the people, the despot they were learning to despise; the liberal genius, the stupid tyrant; the incorruptible protector, the racketeering gangster; the Goddamned Commie, the Goddamned fascist. He might raise the nation’s standard of living; he might spend everything on palaces and yachts and a numbered Swiss account. “You just don’t know, do you. You just can’t tell. I wish he’d been in office longer.”

“He could say the same about you.”

Fairlie laughed.

McNeely waited for him to knot his tie and then handed him the speech. “Nothing out of the ordinary. One of the standard variations on harmony and friendship.”

“It’ll do.” Fairlie was looking it over carefully, committing blocks of it to memory so he wouldn’t have to speak with downcast eyes glued to the page. He liked to eyeball his audiences. In this case it hardly mattered; the speech was short and it was in English and at least half the people in the room wouldn’t understand one word in ten.

“Sometimes,” McNeely said, “I wonder if we really need these damned bases at all. They’re like sores on the earth, they keep festering.”

“We’re all developing a conscience, aren’t we? This revulsion toward the idea of global power. We’d all like to return to simple times and unload these responsibilities.”