A Clear and Present Danger Read Online Free PDF Page B

girls, let alone the billfold.”
    The young man wiped at his mouth.
    “You want some coffee, Edward?”
    “Oh yeah, thanks so much. I’m dying for coffee.”
    “Better than dying for something else, right, dearie?”
    The young man smiled, which brought out a maternal feeling in the receptionist. She waddled away from her desk to a coffee
     maker, returning with a cup for her charge.
    “Now, I’m going to have to check for passport information, arrange to issue you a temporary document, and then I’m going to
     have to call your parents and see if they’re good for your return ticket home,” she explained.
    “Oh, thanks a lot,” he said, a huge sigh of relief escaping from his dry lips.
    Then he asked, “Could I wash my face?”
    The receptionist took her place behind her desk. She smiled at him and said, “Yeah, I’d like you to wash your face. You’ll
     look a lot better. Men’s room’s down that hallway.”
    Folger followed her finger and disappeared from the reception area, leaving her to her typing and telephoning. He found the
     door to the men’s room, but before entering it, he looked behind him to make sure he was alone in the hallway.
    Then he walked past the door to the end of the corridor and a pair of large double doors. He cracked a door open. The ballroom
     beyond was empty.
    Folger stepped inside the ballroom and turned immediately to his right. The heating duct he knew would be about six paces
     right was where it should be, just above the baseboard and set into the wainscoting. He knelt to his task.
    He pulled a screwdriver from his rucksack and removed the metal plating of the heating duct. Then he took a small package
     from the rucksack, along with a roll of black electrician’s tape.
    He placed the package inside the duct and secured it with the tape. Then he worked at the package with his fingers, expertly.
     When he was through, he replaced the metal plating.
    Then he left the ballroom, washed up in the men’s room, and returned to the reception area.
    “Looks like everything checks out, dearie. We’ll provide your ticket back home. Your father and mother will be waiting for
     you at Kennedy. Better luck next time,” the receptionist said.
    “Thanks a whole lot. Really.”
    The young man smiled as the receptionist finished her typing.
    5:45 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, 25 January 1981
    Air Force II, carrying a napping George Bush, was 104 miles off the western coast of Ireland, en route to London’s Heathrow
     Airport.

Six
    WASHINGTON, D.C., 25 January 1981
    Hamilton Winship was a man of habit. If it was forty-five minutes past the noon hour, which it was, then it was time to leave
     his office in the Treasury Building and take a stroll along the Potomac.
    He had begun this habit back in the Ford Administration, as he recalled. That was when Edith had started complaining that
     he ought to get more exercise, in addition to complaining about the weight he had been gaining as a result of the heavy eating
     and, for Winship, heavy drinking of late.
    Winship had his reasons for those indulgences. They helped dull the anxiety, the malaise he could not shake. It was hardly
     the usual mid-life crisis. Hamilton Winship was sixty-three years old, and the malaise was still with him.
    Ever since the call from Dot Samuels—the hysterical call in the middle of the night—the malaise had grown to an abiding stomach
     ache. Even if he’d wanted a long lunch at the Sans Souci, it woud have been out of the question. His stomach couldn’t take
     it.
    And so he strolled along the Potomac. The day was gray and businesslike. A complete contrast from the bright blue skies of
     last week, he thought, and the bright hopes attendant to a new Administration. On top of it all, the hostages had finally
     come home.
    But today, on the first day of the first full week of the new order, it was gray and businesslike.
    Winship looked up in the air. Somewhere, the new Vice President was on his way to