The sweeper might have stayed rooted, screaming until he was hoarse, but an elderly vacationer spotted him and the body from her hotel window and phoned the police.

‘Better bring an ambulance too,’ she said. ‘There’s a hysterical man down there.’

The police brought more than an ambulance. They brought photographers and reporters and television crews. For something had happened during the night to make the death of this man a very important matter, important enough to call a press conference where James Bullingsworth’s doozy of an idea—his belief in a federal government plot to infiltrate local governments and jail key officials—got a public airing.

Waving the Bullingsworth notes before the heavy lights of TV camera crews, who were paid overtime for the pre-dawn work, a local politician of minor rank talked ominously of the ’most treacherous act of government interference in the history of our nation.’

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he intended to interfere with local government very much. He intended to make it do its job.

He rested his toes in the brick crevices, and with his charcoal-blackened hands pressed flat against the rough brick, kept his balance outside the window. He could smell the heavy fumes of Boston. He could feel the vibrations of the traffic down below in the dampish night street through the building wall, and he wished he were in some place warm and sunny, like Miami Beach. But his assignment was Boston. First things first.

A passerby, fourteen stories below in front of the hotel, would never see this figure pressed into the wall, for he wore black shoes, black pants and black shirt, and his face and hands were blackened with a charcoal paste given him by the man who had taught him that the side of a building could be a ladder if the mind knew how to use it as one.

Voices came from the open window near his right kneecap. The window should not have been open, but then the two detectives and plainclothesmen hadn’t done their job very well from the beginning.