Free The Chancellor Manuscript by Robert Ludlum

from the housekeeper’s room at the other side of the house. Upstairs the sounds were fainter but discernible; it was the eleven o’clock news. The doctor wondered briefly what tomorrow’s eleven o’clock news would be like. He wished he could be in Washington to hear it.
    He crossed to the staircase and began to climb. At the top he stood in front of the door to the right of the staircase, in the center of the landing. The door that led to the man he had waited over two decades to see.
    Waited in hatred. Deep hatred, never to be forgotten.
    He turned the knob cautiously and opened the door. The director had dozed off, his enormous head angled down, the jowls falling over his thick neck. In his fat, feminine hands were the spectacles his vanity rarely allowed him to use to public.
    The doctor went to the television set and turned it up so that the sound filled the room. He crossed back to the foot of the bed and stared down at the object of his loathing.
    The director’s head snapped down, then abruptly up. His face was contorted.
    “What?”
    “Put on your glasses,” said the doctor above the noise of the television set.
    “What’s this? Miss Gandy?… Who are you? You’re not—?” Shaking, Hoover put on his glasses.
    “Look closely. It’s been twenty-two years.”
    The bulging eyes within the folds of flesh beyond the lenses focused. The sight they saw caused their possessor to gasp. “You! How—?”
    “Twenty-two years,” continued the doctor mechanically but loud enough to be heard above the sound of sirens and music from the television set. He reached into his pocket and took out a hypodermic needle. “I have a different name now. I practice in Paris, where my patients haveheard the stories but don’t concern themselves.
Le médecin américain
is considered one of the finest in the hospital—?”
    Suddenly the director swung his arm out toward the night table. The doctor lunged forward at the side of the bed, pinning the soft wrist against the mattress. Hoover began to scream; the doctor jammed his elbow into the jowls, cutting off all sound. He raised the naked, trembling arm.
    With his teeth the doctor took off the rubber tip of the needle. He plunged the hypodermic into the rubbery flesh of the exposed armpit.
    “This is for my wife and my son. Everything you stole from me.”
    The driver of the gray automobile turned in his seat, his eyes directed at the second-story windows of the house. The lights were extinguished for five seconds, then turned on again.
    The unknown doctor had done his work; the release in the headboard had been found and activated. There were no seconds to be lost. The driver removed the microphone from the radio unit, pressed the button, and spoke.
    “Phase One completed,” he said tersely in a pronounced British accent.
    The office stretched for nearly forty feet. The large mahogany desk at one end was slightly elevated, facing low, overstuffed leather chairs, forcing visitors to raise their eyes to its occupant. Beyond the desk, obscuring the wall beyond, was a row of flags, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s banner sharing the center position with the nation’s.
    Varak stood motionless in front of the desk, his eyes on the two telephones. One instrument had its receiver out of the cradle, the open line connected to a phone in the cellar of the building, to a man in the relay room where all alarms were controlled. The other phone was intact; it was an outside line that bypassed the bureau’s switchboard. There was no number printed on the circular tab in the middle of the dial.
    The center drawer of the desk was open. Beside it stood a second man, the spill of the desk lamp illuminating his right hand, which was angled, palm up, in the openspace of the drawer. His fingers touched a small toggle switch recessed in the roof of the desk.
    The telephone began to ring. Varak picked it up at the first hint of sound. He said one word quietly.
    “Flags.”
    “Phase