Ed stood up. ‘I think I’ll call him all the same. If you’re right about this virus—’

‘Oh, I’m right about it. I wish I wasn’t. And you go ahead and call him. I don’t suppose he remembers one boozed-up Kansas has-been from five years ago.’

‘Can I reach you here?’ asked Ed.

Dr Benson checked his watch. ‘Sure. I have to drive out to Garden City late this afternoon, but you can catch me here until four.’

‘I’ll call you,’ said Ed.

He left the laboratory and stepped out into the hot mid-morning sunshine again. He paused by the statue to put on his sunglasses, and for a moment he stood looking at the smiling family who were sprouting out of the giant ear of wheat. Then he walked across the plaza to the parking-lot, and his shadow followed him like a nagging doubt that wouldn’t be shaken off.

Seven

In the cold air-conditioned offices on Independence Avenue which Senator Jones’s fifteen-strong staff probably knew better than their own houses and apartments, Peter Kaiser was completing the complicated groundwork for the Blight Crisis Appeal, and completing it fast. Throughout the windowless, fluorescent-lit warren of partitions, telephones were ringing and typewriters were nattering and girls were hurrying backwards and forwards with messages and memos and files.

Peter Kaiser was tall, black-haired, and good-looking if you liked men who wore permanent-press suits and striped ties and grinned a lot. His friends said he resembled George Hamilton. He had been a promising junior in the early days of the first Nixon administration, and it showed. He still believed that Nixon could make a comeback. Pierre Trudeau had, Mrs Indira Gandhi had – why not the most competent and misunderstood president of all time?

On Independence Avenue, Peter was known as ‘The Machine’. He was never inspired, and rarely original, but once Shearson Jones had set him a task, he went through it like something inhuman. Nobody ever saw him eat in the office, although he grudgingly permitted the rest of the staff to send out for Big Macs and shakes when they had to work through their lunch-hour; and Karen Fortunoff, one of the prettier and wittier secretaries, said she had once seen him take a covert swig from her can of typewriter oil.

The only sign of real life which Peter ever exhibited was when he touched the girls’ bottoms – always slyly, and always quasi-accidentally, so they were never absolutely sure if he meant it or not. He dated one or two of the girls occasionally, but his affairs rarely lasted. One girl had complained that he was ‘all boxed roses, Frank Sinatra mood music, and fumbles under the table.’