Peggy Brockman stared through the window down at the green water pond on the back side of the embassy. She saw two fish swimming just below the surface and wondered if anyone ever tried catching them. She couldn't imagine any of her America colleagues sitting on the bank of a klong, waiting for a bite, but maybe some of the Thai embassy employees did such things once in a while.

The phone rang and she answered it.

"Peggy, come into my office?" The voice on the intercom line was Glen Spritz, the chief of the embassy's political section and her direct supervisor.

"Take a look at this?" Glen greeted her by holding out an incoming telegram as she walked in through his office door. She stood in front of his desk as she read through the telegram from the State Department. Another Congressional delegation, what American diplomats call a CODEL, was coming to Bangkok. This CODEL included just one Senator, Calvin Talcott, along with his special assistant, Dale Hamilton. The last paragraph read: "Senator Talcott requests that P.D. Brockman be assigned as embassy control officer in Bangkok."

American Embassies always assign a diplomatic officer as a control officer whenever a congressional delegation visits a foreign country. It's a gofor style job that includes the responsibility for arranging embassy briefings and visits to foreign officials as well as sticking close to the Congressman to make sure nothing goes wrong.

"I'd normally give this chore to Bob or Denise," Glen said, referring to two junior Foreign Service Officers working on their first overseas assignments. "Why is he asking for you?"

"I have no idea!," Peggy snapped back. She knew exactly what Glen was thinking. He was wrong, but Peggy couldn't think of a good way to tell him that.

"What the Senator wants, the Senator gets," Glen said. She saw the flash of a smirk on Glen's face as he added, "He's all yours."

Rather than going back to her own office, Peggy headed for the embassy cafeteria for a break. As she walked into the cafeteria, she saw Justin Szabo, the embassy security officer, who was sitting at a table by himself. Peggy jumped the line straight to the coffee pot, poured herself a cup, paid the smiling cashier with a brown ten baht note and walked over to Justin's table.

"Your mad is showing," Justine said as she sat down next to him. "I saw the CODEL telegram."

She smiled for the first time since she'd read the telegram. "I was trying to not let it show," she said.

She and Justin had joined the Foreign Service at the same time and had suffered together through the State Department's two month diplomatic officer training course. They had dated a few times back then, but their diplomatic assignments had separated them by oceans for several years before Peggy arrived in Bangkok to find him stationed there.

"So what are the old boys saying about me?" Peggy asked. "Or are they just snickering and looking owl eyed at each other when someone mentions my name with the Senator's?"

"The smart old boys knows that if you were already on Talcott's bimbo list, you would have known he was coming to Bangkok before the Ambassador did. He wouldn't have had to ask to make sure you would be around."

"He's hitting six different capital cities and Bangkok is the only place where he asked for a control officer by name," Peggy complained.

"Maybe Bangkok is the only place where he doesn't already have a girl friend. You going to file charges for sexual harassment?"

"How? I've got nothing substantial to peg it on. The only time I met the Senator was while I was still in Lima. We talked about Peruvian politics for maybe an hour."

"That was all?"

She hesitated a moment, then admitted, "He asked me where I wanted to go for my next assignment. I told him I had asked for Bangkok but that the Department had sent me orders for Costa Rica."

"And now you're in Bangkok."

"Two weeks after his visit to Peru, my guru in Personnel called me to tell me they had changed the assignment to Thailand. I never considered the possibility that Senator Talcott might have arranged that, until I saw that telegram."

"That's typical Talcott courting," Justin said. "He does favors and expects that the woman will be grateful the next time he runs into her. If the gossip is true, it works, at least sometimes."

"That's why that damn telegram made me so mad. If that bastard thinks I'm that grateful, he's going to wish he never met this woman."

"Play it straight and professional and you won't have any trouble with him," Justin assured her. "Talcott doesn't make a move unless he's sure that the woman will say yes."

"Except that you'll be the only guy in the embassy who knows that it was all business. With everyone else, I'm stuck with a reputation no matter what I do."

"I'll make sure the word gets around about how disappointed Talcott was in Bangkok."

"If Talcott steps over the line, he'll be more than disappointed," she hissed.

She sipped on the cooling coffee for a while, then asked, "What else do you know about Senator Talcott?"

"Watch out for Talcott's special assistant, Dale Hamilton. He's smart, but too ugly and mean to get elected to public office on his own. He's the guy with the long nose hiding in the bushes while Talcott courts the voters."

"That's what I figured from what I saw in Lima." "Hamilton is also good at leaking secrets and rumors that keep Talcott in the headlines. We think he leaked a CIA report that Islamic terrorists are out to get the Senator."

"Will security be a problem?" she asked.

"Not that we know about. There was a follow up CIA report that canceled out the first report. Hamilton didn't leak that one."

"The Senator wants the embassy briefing at the hotel, not at the embassy," Dale Hamilton said as he and Peggy Brockman rode in the back seat of an embassy car on the way into the city from Don Myang Airport. The Senator and the Ambassador were riding in the Ambassador's limousine at the head of the small motorcade. In his early forties, Hamilton's heavy paunch bulged against the light blue safari suit he wore as he sat catty-corner so he could look at the pretty diplomat sitting beside him.

"If we brief at the hotel, we can only discuss unclassified information," Peggy explained. "We won't be able to talk about the narcotics trafficking situation nor any CIA reporting on internal Thai politics."

"I thought the Cold War was over," Hamilton growled. "Isn't spying a dead game these days? Who would be listening?"

"We still assume the walls have ears anywhere outside the embassy," she answered.

"You telling me you trust the Thai government to provide security for the Senator, but you don't trust them not to listen to our private conversations?"

"It's not just governments who plant bugs," Peggy said.

"I can't imagine what secrets you cookie pushers know that the newspapers don't already have," Hamilton snorted. He waited a moment, giving her a chance to back down and give him what he wanted. When she said nothing, he recognized she was going to hang tough, so he conceded. "The Senator will want the classified briefing, even if he has to ride across town to get it."

Peggy sat back in her seat and listened as Dale Hamilton started complaining about the traffic. It was going to be a long day, she decided. The only good news was that the CODEL would be leaving town the next morning.

Justin Szabo walked into the embassy's control room in the Praya River Hotel where CODEL Talcott was staying just after nine the next morning. Peggy Brockman was already there.

"The motorcade is lined up and ready to head for the airport," Justin told her. "Are our visitors ready to go?"

"Hamilton has been in here a couple of times," Peggy answered, her voice abrupt. "I haven't seen the Senator this morning." Her voice carried a tense tone, like she was angry, or maybe nervous about something.

"Something go wrong with the Senator's visit?" Justin asked her.

"No! Nothing!" She answered too quickly, speaking just a little too loud.

Dale Hamilton walked into the control room before Justin could ask any more questions.

"Do one of you have an extra key card to the Senator's room?" the staff aide asked them. "He doesn't answer the phone and he didn't come when I knocked on the door."

"I've got one in the safe," Peggy said. She turned and dialed open the small safe the embassy administrative officer had put in the control room. She pulled out the envelope that contained duplicate key cards for each of the CODEL rooms, picked out the one to the Senator's room and handed it to Hamilton.

Hamilton grabbed the key card from her, spun and walked back out the door in a worried hurry. Justin and Peggy followed along behind him.

At the Senator's door, Hamilton used the computer coded key card to open it. Followed by the two embassy officers, he crossed the suite's sitting room, calling out the Senator's name as he approached the open door leading into the bedroom.

"God!" he said as he stepped through the door. The two embassy officers could see what he could see as soon as the stepped up behind Hamilton.

Wearing bright blue pajamas, the Senator was lying on his back on the floor half way from the bed to the bathroom. The front of his pajamas and the floor around him were soaked with blood. The decorative handle of a Malaysian Kris stood at attention on the Senator's chest, the serpentine dagger blade stuck deep into the Senator's heart. The killer had used a towel to dip into the Senator's blood and write across a wall the words, "Death to all infidels." "I warned you they were after him!" Dale Hamilton shouted at the two embassy officers. "They've killed him."

Twenty-four hours later, Justin Szabo sat behind his desk looking at Peggy Brockman sitting in front of the desk. She looked as tired as Justin felt.

"I just talked to Colonel Sanong again," Justin said, referring to the Thai police officer responsible for the security of diplomats in Bangkok. "He can't explain how a terrorist could have slipped onto that hotel room. He had one man guarding the elevator entrance to that floor and another man at the stair well exit."

"Dale Hamilton is telling the press that corrupt Thai police sold the Senator out to the terrorists," Peggy said. "Hamilton has been calling the Ambassador every hour on the hour, demanding explanations for why the Thai police haven't caught the murderer yet," Justin said. "Then the Ambassador calls me and the slop sloshes down hill." He held up one telegram taken from a pile of telegrams on his desk. "The FBI is sending out a special agent to monitor the Thai police investigation. I want to line up as many ducks as possible before he arrives."

"What do you need from me?" Peggy asked, worried because Justin had called her in for a talk and was being so formal about it.

"Colonel Sanong says the guard at the elevator reported you went onto the hotel floor at 11:15 p.m. that evening. Why?"

"An Immediate telegram came into the embassy from the Senator's Washington office. I picked it up and delivered it to the Senator. I waited while he read it in case he wanted to send a reply. He didn't, so I went home."

She wasn't a good liar, Justin thought to himself. People who don't regularly practice lying don't do it well. But he couldn't be sure if she was lying, or just holding something back.

"The Thai policeman at the elevator claims he never saw you leave," he said, feeling his way carefully as he questioned her.

"That's because he was sitting in his chair by the elevator sound asleep when I left--a real dedicated public servant."

"Why didn't you wake him up?"

"I wish I had, now," she confessed. "But what good would it have done? He'd just gone back to sleep as soon as the elevator door closed behind me. It's obvious that the killer sneaked past the sleeping guard and killed the Senator? Colonel Sanong is trying to cover his own hind end because he put incompetent people on the job."

"Whoever killed the Senator had to have a computer coded key card for the Senator's room," Justin pointed out. "The hotel gave us the only two key cards coded with that combination. The Senator had one in his room with him, you had the other in the safe in the control room."

"The hotel must have made other copies they didn't tell us about," Peggy insisted. "Can't just about any employee with access to the hotel computer do that?"

"Sanong claims that didn't happen. The computer tracks number of copies and the PIN code of the employee making a copy."

Peggy sat straight up, the fatigue on her face suddenly gone. "Are you accusing me of helping someone kill the Senator?"

"I'm not, but Dale Hamilton has already suggested that if crazy terrorists didn't kill the Senator, then it must have been someone working for the embassy with access to that key card in the control room safe."

"That's insane," she said, her voice suddenly so angry she sounded almost hysterical.

Justin waited for a few moments for her to get control, knowing that what he was going to say next would make her even madder.

"Hamilton claims he arranged for the Senator's office to send that telegram as an excuse to get you into the Senator's hotel room in the evening, and that you knew that."

She was so mad, she started to shout something. Then she took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and spoke slowly, carefully. "I guessed that I was being set up as an opportunity the Senator might take advantage of," Peggy admitted, her voice as bitter as unripe cherries. "Hamilton let me know yesterday that Talcott did pull strings to get me assigned to Bangkok. That doesn't mean I played the game."

"Hamilton claims there was more than just cocktail conversation between you and the Senator in Lima."

"He's lying Justin. I swear he's lying."

"Why would he lie?"

She thought for a long moment. "Maybe he's telling what he thinks is the truth," she finally said. "Maybe the Senator bragged about things he never did."

"Colonel Sanong's men found your fingerprints in the Senator's suite, in the sitting room, the bedroom, and the bathroom," he told her. "You've got diplomatic immunity so the Thai police can't question you without the Ambassador's approval, but if Sanong can't find some terrorist to blame it on, that FBI investigator is going to put you at the top of the list of possible suspects."

She stared at him for a moment, her eyes cold. "What do you believe, Justin?" she asked, using his name as a reminder of what their own relation had once been.

"I don't believe you killed the Senator. But I know you were angry at him and you're not telling me the whole story. If you would, maybe I could help you."

"You're making it sound like it would be a better idea if I got a good lawyer."

"If you don't trust me, you should."

"Why should I trust you? Because we slept together a couple of times several years ago? One thing I've learned since then, you don't trust a colleague in this business if dumping on you can help his diplomatic career."

"If I worried about my career, we wouldn't be having this conversation," he said. "Tell me what happened when you took that telegram to the Senator's room."

She stood up suddenly, obviously nervous. She turned and looked at the closed door into his office. For a moment he thought she was going to walk out of his office. Then she turned around and sat back down.

"You know embassy control officers often deliver telegrams to a CODEL's hotel room, and sometimes late at night," she said. "I've done it before and never thought anything about it. I figured that I was going to play it exactly that way, like a legitimate job requirement. If he invited me into his room while he read it, I would tell him I'd wait in the control room until he decided whether he wanted to send a reply."

"But you did go into the room?"

"Driving from the embassy to the hotel, I got madder and madder about how he had ordered me up like something from room service. I thought about how many times he must have pulled that kind of trick on some poor woman awed by the smell of his power and position. He misused that power to get what he wanted, but oh so damn carefully, making sure it always looked like something between two consenting adults. I decided it was about time for someone to bring the bastard down."

"You wanted to entrap him so you could charge him with sexual harassment? How, with just the two of you there? You weren't wearing a wire, were you?"

"I thought about it. I didn't know where to find one at that time of night. It was a crazy idea. I admit it. I didn't think it through. I guess I hoped I could get him to admit he'd deliberately gotten my assignment changed with the expectation of a sexual payoff. You know as well as I do, people will believe the woman who claims sexual harassment, even if she has no other proof."

"How did it develop?"

"It didn't." she answered. "He opened the door and apologized because I had to work so late. He suggested I sit down while he read through the telegram and asked if I wanted a drink. I told him I'd like a cola and he pulled one out of the courtesy refrigerator."

"Colonel Sanong has the bottle and the glass you drank it from."

"I sipped the pop while he read through the message."

"Then?"

"He told me he didn't need to send a reply. After that, we talked for a while. I was the one who kept the conversation going. I tried to act sexy and available, but he didn't bite. Instead, he suggested it was late and that he had to get up early the next morning."

"How did your fingerprints get in the bedroom and the bathroom?"

"I wasn't ready to give it up. I wanted the bastard's scalp. I asked him if I could use the bathroom before I left. I thought he might follow me into the bedroom and do something that I could act on. I guess I touched a few things. After I finished in the bathroom, I walked around the bedroom, still hoping he'd make a move on me. Finally, he called from the sitting room and asked if I was okay. So I gave it up and went home. I must have done something that warned him I was dangerous."

"Why do you think that?" Justin asked.

"The last thing he said, just before he let me out, was, 'You are a pretty woman, but please, after this, don't believe everything you hear about me."

"Any idea what he meant."

"Obviously, he read my signals. Obviously, I'm not the actress I thought I was."

"In the morning, in the control room, you acted like you were nervous, maybe angry," Justin said.

"I was damn angry," she answered. "Glen Spritz ate breakfast with Dale Hamilton. Glen dropped by the control room afterward. I looked up and caught him leering at me like I was sitting on a bar stool with my skirt hiked up to my thighs. He made a crack about how nothing helped a career like a little late evening overtime work as he walked out the door. When you walked in I was planning out how I was going to confront Glen and his dirty little suspicions the next time I saw him."

"Dale told me he met Hamilton for breakfast. Hamilton joked about the Senator adding another trophy to his collection."

"What am I supposed to do now?" she asked, suddenly deflated with seriousness of the trouble she faced.

"Can you think of anything that supports your story?"

"No," she said, her voice low, almost scared.

"I wish you had been wired," Justin said.

"So do I," she said. She thought a minute, then added, her voice taking a sudden upbeat tone. "I just thought of one thing I might try."

"What?"

"Let me check it out, first. It's a crazy idea, but maybe ...?"

She stood up and started for the door, obviously in a hurry, then paused and turned around. "Justin, thanks for being a friend, not a colleague."

"Let's each keep this a private conversation between friends," he said. "Give me anything I can use to help you and I'll take it as far as I can."

Back in her own office, Peggy sat staring out the window at the green pond below while she planned for a bit of fishing in a diplomatic pond. She reached for the phone, called the Foreign Ministry, and invited Siri Idipong for lunch at the Song Daeng, a restaurant specializing in traditional Thai cooking that was near the Foreign Ministry.

Siri Idipong was sitting at a table for two when Peggy walked into the crowded restaurant.

"I've already ordered for both of us," Siri said as Peggy sat down. "Mee krob, gaeng mussaman, and some lemon grass soup."

"With shrimp, I hope," Peggy said.

"Of course!"

Siri was a Thai Foreign Service Officer currently assigned to the Protocol Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A bright and pretty woman about Peggy's age with long, silky black hair and a model's shape, she had become Peggy's best Thai friend in the four months Peggy had been working in the country.

"We are following the investigation very closely," Siri said, anticipating the subject she knew Peggy wanted to talk about. "I can't tell you anything your security officer doesn't already know."

"Do you know who the prime suspect is?" Peggy asked.

"I know that some mid-East assassin didn't sneak into the room and murder your Senator," Siri answered, her voice firm and positive.

A waiter arrived and started putting the dishes on the table, placing them family style between the two diplomats. Peggy wondered how much of a sincere friend Siri was. There was always an underlying adversary relationship in diplomatic friendships. Diplomats aren't sent out to find friends in a foreign country, just contacts and sources.

Siri looked up from her plate at Peggy, her almost black eyes locking with Peggy's.

"I don't think you killed the Senator either," she said, speaking slowly, picking her words.

"Do you know who did kill him?" Peggy asked.

"How would I know that?" Siri asked, trying to pretend innocence but not quite pulling it off.

"For the same reason you seem so positive that some mad terrorist didn't do it."

"I don't know what you are talking about?" Siri said quickly. She looked down at the table, then reached for a ladle and filled two small ceramic bowls with lemon grass soup from a charcoal fired, stainless steel hot pot. She placed one of the little bowls in front of Peggy, watching her hands instead of looking up at Peggy.

"Siri!" Peggy said, demanding the other woman's attention to her face. "At least once a month, our security office sends around a memo reminding American diplomats to be careful about where we discuss classified information. If he was sitting at this table, he'd pull the flowers out of the vase, looking for a bug. One time I saw him pick up a pencil in an embassy conference room and break it in two, thinking there might be a bug inside because the pencil wasn't the same brand as the others on the table."

"Why would you think the Thai government is spying on you, or one of your Senators? We are allies, are we not?"

"We spy on you, you spy on us. It's what diplomats do? Senator Talcott was a key member on the Foreign Relations Committee and no friend of Thailand. He voted against your government on the intellectual property rights issue. Don't tell me your government doesn't want to know what he might say to a staff aide in the privacy of his hotel room."

"Isn't part of how we play the game never admitting we do nasty things like listening to each other's private conversations?" the Thai diplomat asked.

"Damnit Siri, we're two women working in a world where the men made the rules before they ever let us in the game. I'm in trouble. If you have anything that might help me, share it with me."

Siri thought about it for about a quarter of a minute. Then she pushed her plate back, like she had suddenly lost her appetite. "We don't have any evidence than can help you," she insisted. "Even if we did, no Thai government official would ever admit that we listened in on a visiting Senator's private conversations."

"Whether you admit it or not, I have to have a copy of the tape," Peggy whispered across the table. "There wouldn't have to be any identification of who made the tape. The tape would speak for itself."

"Khun Peggy," Siri said. "I haven't said anything about any tape." She deliberately reached out and pulled her plate back into position. Doing it Thai style, she used her fork to push a mixture of rice and curry onto her spoon. She raised the spoon to her lips, then hesitated and looked back at Peggy. "If someone should send a tape like that to your embassy, it couldn't be a tape my government made."

"I would never claim it was," Peggy whispered back.

"She had opportunity," FBI Agent Dan Rogers told Justin Szabo as they sat in Szabo's office. "Hamilton tells us she had something going with the Senator ever since Peru. The motive must have been some kind of lover's fight."

"I still don't think she did it," Justin insisted.

"Whoever killed the Senator didn't break into the room," the FBI agent answered. "They were either invited in, or they used the second key card. Only two embassy people had access to that safe. Unless you want to confess you did it, she has to be the one who did it."

Rogers had been in town for two days and he figured he had the case solved. He'd called the meeting to brief Szabo and Dale Hamilton before he presented his findings to the Ambassador.

"If you think she's guilty, why haven't you arrested her?" Dale Hamilton asked.

"I don't have any jurisdiction to make arrests in Thailand," Rogers answered.

"The Thai police can't arrest her because she has diplomatic immunity," the embassy security officer added.

"We'll arrest her as soon as she goes back to the States," the FBI agent explained. "Killing a Senator is a federal crime, no matter where it happens."

"How do we get her to go back?" Hamilton asked.

"If the Ambassador agrees with what Mr. Rogers is proposing, we put her on an airplane and limit her passport so she can't get off the plane and walk out of an airport along the way," Justin explained. "Federal Marshals will be waiting when she steps off the plane at the port of entry."

"What time do we meet with the Ambassador?" Rogers asked.

"We're on his calendar for 2:30 p.m.," Justin answered

"We don't want her knowing she's a suspect before that meeting," Rogers reminded Justin before walking out.

As soon as the two men were gone, Justin's secretary, Cindy Sturgel, stepped into the office. She was holding a small package in her hand. "A messenger just delivered this at the gate," Cindy explained. "The Marine guard checked it out to make sure it's not a letter bomb."

Justin took the package and opened it to find a single cassette recording tape. There were no markings on the cassette nor any indication on the package of whom had sent the tape.

Cindy came back in a few moments later with a small battery operated cassette tape recorder. As she stepped back out of the office, Justin punched the play button.

"As soon as we get back to Washington, we want to start working on next year's campaign strategy," the voice of Senator Talcott said.

"There's one thing we ought to talk about now," Hamilton's voice answered.

Justin knew immediately what he was listening to. He fast forwarded the tape looking for what he hoped would be there. The first time he punched the button, he went too far and had to rewind. The recording system must have had a voice activation switch. The tape didn't run when it couldn't pick up noise in the room. What he was looking for was right after the conversation between the Senator and his staffer, even though it had actually taken place a couple of hours later.

"Come in. Can I offer you a drink while I read this," Senator Talcott's voice said.

"A cola would be fine," Peggy's voice answered.

Whoever had bugged the room had used a voice activated recording device. It took only a few minutes to listen to the conversation of Peggy's late evening visit to the Senator's room. It tracked with what Peggy had told him. He heard Peggy's hints she might be interested in something more personal with the Senator, her request to use the bathroom, the Senator's loud voice asking if there was anything wrong, then the final good-byes when Peggy left the room. Even the bit about asking Peggy not to believe everything she had heard about the Senator was on the tape.

The Senator went to bed shortly after Peggy left. The taping mechanism had a flaw. The sound of snoring triggered the voice activation switch and the Senator's snores could almost be called a trumpet.

Justin listened all the way through to the end of the tape. Then he played it back and listened to every word that was recorded from the conversation between the Senator and Dale Hamilton to the last sounds on the tape.

He played it three more times, replayed several sections, and thought for a long while about how he should handle it. Finally, he reached for his phone.

It was just past two o'clock when Cindy ushered FBI Agent Dan Rogers, Dale Hamilton, and Peggy Brockman into Justin's office.

"What's this about?" Dan Rogers demanded, obviously unhappy to find himself invited to a meeting with his chief suspect without any warning."

Justin had the tape cassette ready to play on the top of his desk. "I think you'll find this interesting," he said as he punched the play button.

He was watching Peggy's face as the voice of the Senator once again invited her into his room. She broke out in a broad, happy smile. Justin was sure that she was somehow responsible for the tape arriving on his desk. Obviously, she had better contacts in the Thai government than Glen Spritz gave her credit for having.

"Where did that tape come from?" Dale Hamilton demanded, his voice loud and angry.

Justin punched the pause button on the machine and explained how the tape had been delivered to the office.

"This is an illegal recording made of the Senator's private conversations, without his knowledge," Hamilton objected. "I insist that I have an opportunity to review the tape before anyone else listens to anything on it." "The only thing on this tape is the conversation between Ms. Brockman and the Senator, and the sounds recorded after she left the room," Justin said. "I don't like the way Szabo is doing this," FBI Agent Rogers interject. "I'm going to have his job for inviting Miss Brockman in at this point, but now that she knows there is such a tape, I want to play it through right now. I don't want to give her any chance to think up explanations."

Justin punched the play button again and they all listened to the conversation between the Senator and Peggy Brockman. Peggy's smile faded away as she looked at the FBI agent as he listened to her obvious temptations tossed at the Senator to only be rejected. They heard the good-byes and then the broken sounds of snoring as the voice activating mechanism turned itself on every time the Senator let loose a loud blast through his nasal passages. Peggy was once again smiling in anticipation of what she expected would be audio proof that she hadn't murdered the Senator. Dale Hamilton suddenly leaped out of his chair. He grabbed the machine, spun, and ran for the door.

The FBI agent jumped up and took out after him, shouting for him to stop. Justin and Peggy could hear Roger's voice demanding that Hamilton stop as he chased the man through the embassy hallways.

"You let him steal the evidence," Peggy hissed at Justin. "What if he gets away with it?"

"There wasn't any more evidence on that tape," Justin told her. "Whoever set up the bug wasn't monitoring the machine around the clock. They left the tape running on automatic overnight, but forgot to put in a new cassette. It's all snoring sounds until the tape runs out."

"Then why? ..." She suddenly laughed as she caught on. "Hamilton didn't know that."

"I was afraid he wouldn't panic like he did," Justin said. "But I had to try something. The tape not only didn't prove your innocence, you heard what you sounded like throwing yourself at the Senator. If Hamilton hadn't panicked, that FBI agent would have been convinced that you used that second card key to go back and murder the Senator because he rejected you."

"Can you prove Hamilton did it?"

"If he hadn't panicked and ran, I don't think so." Justin reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a cassette tape which he held up for her to see. "I made a copy of a part of the original tape. Hamilton just stole the copy. This original records Hamilton trying to talk the Senator into retiring so he could run for the job himself. He warned Talcott if he didn't retire, the voters would throw him our of office because of the gossip about his love life. The Senator accused Hamilton of spreading rumors about the Senator's supposed seductions that weren't true. He told Hamilton he could stand losing an election but there was no way he would let Hamilton take his place."

"He killed the Senator because the Senator wouldn't step aside?"

"This morning, I heard Hamilton bragging to the Ambassador that he expects to be appointed to fill out the Senator's term."

"But how did Hamilton get back into the Senator's room?"

"The Senator's card key was sitting on top of the television set when we walked in. Hamilton must have picked it up on his way out after that conversation. He used it to get back into the room after you left. After he killed the Senator, he left it lying where he had first found it. He probably expected that the Thai police would buy that story about some terrorist killing the Senator. You became a fall back position in case they didn't."

"A very vulnerable one." "We keep telling our official visitors that the walls have ears," Justin said. "Hamilton forgot the warning, then when I played the tape, he forgot something else."

"What?"

"Even when they walls have ears, they don't always listen to everything."

[NOTE: We have obtained permission from the author to republish this article on BuildFreedom.]

Copyright 1996--Mack Tanner. This original work may not be copied or distributed in any format without the specific consent of the author.

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