The Pentagon looked gray and shabby in the rain. It bulked like an ancient fortress over the greenery of Virginia. The old parking lots, converted into athletic fields for the Defense Department personnel, were bare and empty except for the growing puddles pockmarked by the raindrops. Off in the mists, like enchanted castles in the clouds, the glass- walled office buildings of Crystal City lent a touch of contrast to the brooding old concrete face of the Pentagon. 184

Feeling as cold and gray within himself as the weather outside, Kinsman watched the Pentagon approach through the rain-streaked windows of the morning bus. As always, the bus was jammed with office workers, many of them in uniform. They were silent, morose, wrapped in their own private miseries at 7:48 in the morning.

The Pentagon corridors had once been painted in cheer- ful pastels, but now they were faded and grim. Kinsman checked into his own bilious green cubbyhole, noted the single appointment glowing on his desktop computer screen, and immediately headed for Colonel Murdock's office.

Frank Colt was already there, slouched in a fake leather chair in the Colonel's outer office. Otherwise the area was unpopulated. Even the secretaries' desks were empty. Frank always arrives on the scene ahead of everybody else, creases sharp and buttons polished, Kinsman thought. Wonder how he does it?

"Morning," said Colt, barely glancing up at Kinsman.

"I'm glad you didn't say good morning," Kinsman re- plied.

"Sure as shit ain't that."

Kinsman nodded. "Murdock's not in yet?"

Colt gave him a surly look. "Hey, man, it's only eight o'clock. He told us to be here at eight sharp, right? That means he won't waltz in here for another half-hour. You know that."

The Colonel's got his own car, he doesn't have to hit the bus on schedule.

"How'd the party go last night?" Colt asked.

"Lousy. Neal's getting more stubborn every year."

"We're gonna hafta lower the boom on him."

"That might not be so easy."

"I know, but what else is there?"

"Maybe if we got somebody to brief him on the space- plane interceptor . . . he's pissed about not being in on that."

"Murdock don't have the guts to suggest that upstairs."

"I know."

The secretaries began drifting in, chatting over their plastic cups of synthetic coffee. True luxury now consisted of obtaining real coffee, smuggled in through the embargo that extended from Mexico's borders southward. 185

Sniffing at the aroma, Colt said, "How can they make it smell so good and taste so lousy?"

Kinsman shook his head.

"Damned Commies won't stop at nothing," Colt com- plained to the world in general. "First they cut off our oil, and now our coffee."

The Colonel's private secretary, an iron-gray woman with a hawklike unsmiling face, arrived last—as befitted her rank.

"Colonel Murdock is upstairs," she informed Kinsman and Colt. How she knew this was a mystery they did not question. "He's briefing the General on yesterday's testi- mony."

Yesterday's fiasco, thought Kinsman.