Free First Citizen by Thomas T. Thomas Page B

excellent. His grades were top notch. Wish I had as good. He was liked and respected. So what was the point in cheating on a God-damned essay question? Unless he was and is, at heart, a corrupt soul. Unless he is so crooked he will make three left-hand turns where one right will do.
    And the further point is: You must not believe his easy explanations on this insurance resolution. He is an attorney, like the rest of us. So why would he cut his own throat and ours and all of his profession’s unless he could take monstrous profit from it?
    And still further: He has ambitions. He wants nothing less than to steal this country. After he has done away with you and me, the Constitution, and the fellow behind the tree. He has it all plotted out in his mind. Step by fiendish, fanatical step. We can stop him now, here, or we will have to stop him later. And then it will take a war!
    You are still not listening. I tell you, you must not trust the man!

Chapter 5
     
    Granville James Corbin: Rub’ Al Khali
     
    Our helicopter took off from Riyadh with a clatter of rotor blades. Otherwise it was quiet.
    The situation had caught me off guard. No, that’s not right. It was my own swelled head. I had come to the pad thinking that the company was treating its newest Harvard acquisition with the proper respect. Two Saudi pilots—though one turned out to be native American—had been detailed to chauffeur me on a private tour of the northern oil fields. And then this incredibly full-bodied Arabian stewardess, sans veil, was coming over to tuck me in.
    The price of oil had been inching back up toward thirty dollars a barrel so Petramin was starting to flex its fiscal muscles again. Sending the American brass and top staffers out to the field on orientation trips was part of the company’s good-times consumption pattern. “Visiting the money,” our senior counsel in Houston had called my trip which, he’d hinted, would spotlight me as an important player in the organization.
    It’s a wonder my head fit through the helicopter’s sliding door. I was so smug that I forgot to avert my gaze politely when the stewardess lifted one long, nylon-smooth leg over the door’s sill. My eyes took a bite out of her exposed thigh. Then I saw her sawed-off shotgun.
    The social dynamic in the cabin changed immediately. She and the American pilot argued briefly about destinations, which I could follow only from the maps I’d seen pinned to the wall in the airfield’s office. The Saudi pilot seemed to be backing her; so the American shrugged and lifted off with a clatter.
    And by that time, my moment had passed. If I had been more alert, watching her hands instead of her legs—and if I hadn’t already buckled my lap and shoulder belts—I might have broken her wrist, on the hand holding the scatter gun, with a flying side kick while she was busy climbing aboard. Or taken her with a straight kick to the throat: she wouldn’t have had time to bring her weapon to bear and fire if she were busy strangling.
    But the little conference up front ended too quickly and we were fifteen feet in the air before I woke up and remembered all those good karate moves. By then she was settled in and ready, and a single shot from her would have blown out both pilots and the nose of the aircraft. But for the rest of the flight my eyes never stopped measuring distances, angles of fire, the tension in her hands, the focus of her attention. My hand never strayed far from the quick release on the seat harness.
    I wasn’t too worried about the Saudi pilot who was displaying a NATO-issue Beretta 9mm automatic pistol. If he tried to get a shot at me moving from between the cockpit seats, he only had about a one-in-ten chance of hitting something vital in my anatomy. Of course, he had about nine-in-ten of drilling the turbine engine, which was aft of the bulkhead behind us. But if that happened, I imagined they could autorotate down to some kind of landing.
    Still, the