but he didn’t notice. As he walked down the block to his car one of the men ran out in the street to stop another car that was going by. He spoke earnestly to the driver, gesturing toward Ralph. Whereupon the driver nodded and did a hasty and illegal U-turn. When Ralph started his car and drove off, the other driver was on his tail.
“Son of a bitch!” St. Yves said. “That was close. Another five minutes and we would have spent the evening watching an empty apartment, waiting for him to come out.” Pulling his small canvas bag full of walkie-talkies out of the rear seat of Kit’s car, he led the way into the apartment across the street from Schuster’s. “You ready, Red Bear?” he called into one of the three walkie-talkies that he pulled from the bag.
“Right,” came Peterson’s voice.
“The den is empty. You may commence hibernation.”
“Right.”
St. Yves went to the window and turned the Venetian blind slats so that he could look through them. “Here they come,” he said.
Kit sat down on the ancient red couch that lined one wall of the furnished apartment. His job didn’t seem exactly essential to the success of the operation, but he thought he had figured out what he was doing there—why he had been called. Having Kit share in the extralegal operation served several purposes from St. Yves’ point of view. It “blooded” Kit, and made him one of the brotherhood by participation. It helped ensure his loyalty. It tested his ability to perform under stress, since even the relatively safe job of standing lookout in an illegal operation can be trying to the fainthearted.
“How’d you know he was going out tonight?” Kit asked.
“That’s the preparation that goes into a well-planned job, my boy,” St. Yves said, beaming with self-satisfaction. “I’ve been scouting this job for several days. Got this apartment, set it up. Ran a check on Schuster’s hours. Then, day before yesterday, I happened to be standing there when the mailman came by. A blue envelope with the crest of the French Embassy was dropped into Schuster’s box.”
“So?”
“So”—St. Yves fished into his coat pocket and pulled out a blue card—“it was a reasonable assumption that one of these was inside.”
Kit examined the invitation. “Clever,” he said. “But why didn’t you go? You could have kept a close eye on Schuster.”
St. Yves turned his head enough to stare coldly at Kit. “I’m not in the slightest interested in Mr. Schuster,” he said. “I’m interested only in the name of his confidential White House source. And when I find out, there’s going to be one less White House employee. He’ll be lucky if the Chief doesn’t file charges.”
Kit shrugged. “Come on, official sources are leaking information all the time, from all branches of government; it’s the great Washington game.”
“When you work for someone,” St. Yves said, “you owe that person a certain amount of loyalty. And when the person you work for is the President of the United States, why then, by the nature of the job you owe him your complete loyalty. You don’t have to agree with him, you don’t even have to like him, but you have to be loyal. It’s one of the things he gets in return for the burden he assumes when he takes office.” Kit had never heard St. Yves speak so intently nor so seriously. He was stating his credo, and a man’s religion is not to be argued with lightly.
“Blue Bear.” Peterson’s voice sounded.
St. Yves grabbed the nearest walkie-talkie. “Right.”
“In.”
“Right.” St. Yves turned to Kit. “Come over here and keep an eye on the door,” he said. “I’m going to set up the scope.”
“Right,” Kit said. It seemed to be contagious. He got off the couch and pulled a straight-back metal-and-plastic chair over to the window. He stared through the blinds at the deserted street while St. Yves retrieved a small battered suitcase from the far end of the couch. The suitcase was lined with thick foam plastic that acted as a shock packing for its contents. Resting on the foam was a complex-looking set of tubes and lenses which St. Yves began to expertly screw together. When he was finished with the optical erector set, he had produced a small tripod-mounted telescope with a 35-millimeter camera mounted at the eyepiece end. The camera was a single-lens reflex with a ground-glass top, so by looking down at the ground glass you could see whatever the scope saw.
“You look like you’re preparing for a long watch,” Kit said, as St. Yves adjusted the scope and sighted it in on the doorway across the street.
“I doubt if the son of a bitch is stupid enough to leave the information lying around,” St. Yves said. “We might have to be watching and listening to him for a while before we get through him to Mr. Rat.”
“Schuster. Schuster,” Kit said again. “Skinny guy with a big nose? I met him once.”
“That right?” St. Yves said calmly, peering into the ground glass.
“I forgot till just now. He came up to my office to question me about the Watergate business.”
“What’d you tell him?” St. Yves asked.
Kit shook his head. “Not a damn thing. What could I tell him?”
“That’s right,” St. Yves said, his head still down over the scope. “Some of the things he found out, you didn’t know.”
Kit stared out at the empty street and saw his face reflected back at him in the window glass. Did St. Yves suspect him? Was this a double test to see if Kit would react in some way to the possibility that the name Christopher Young might be found on some slip of paper in Schuster’s desk drawer? St. Yves had clearly known that Schuster had met with Kit even before Kit had placed the name. He must have gone through the name register at the entrance to the Executive Office Building. When Schuster had asked for Kit, both names had been recorded. Had St. Yves invited Kit along to see if he suddenly remembered the name? Did that make him more suspicious—or less? Was St. Yves playing cat-and-mouse with him? Did that explain the lecture on loyalty? Or was this whole thing just making him paranoid? Wheels within wheels. Kit shook his head and decided to ignore the whole business. Schuster was the one with a problem, not him.
* * * *
Schuster turned off Massachusetts Avenue onto Belmont Road and began looking for a place to park. The French Embassy was on the next block. There would almost certainly be valet parking, but that meant tipping the valet and Schuster was constitutionally unable to pay someone else to park his car or pull out his chair at a restaurant. He believed in tipping for service, but not when the service was created merely to get the tip.
He found a place almost directly across from the Embassy and parked and locked the car, then hurried across the street. Waving his invitation at the uniformed doorman, he allowed it and his coat to be taken from him as he was ushered into the building.
Outside, the man called Curtis pulled his car up at a convenient fire hydrant where he could see both Schuster’s car and the French Embassy’s front door. He turned off the engine and lit a cigarette, prepared for long wait.
Inside Schuster’s apartment Peterson finished screwing together the phone in the living room and picked up his walkie-talkie. “Blue Bear,” he said.
“Right.”
“Phone check,” he said.
“Right.”
Peterson put the walkie-talkie down and dialed a number on the phone. It rang five times. “Suicide Prevention Center?”
“What took you so long?” Peterson said.
“Excuse me?”
“It rang five times.”
“I’m sorry,” the voice said. It sounded like a young woman.
“Talk to me,” Peterson said.
“Of