With decorum coming out second best. He spots it first in the taut faces of the Marine guards at the entrance, in their hands making edgy passes over the undone flaps of their Navy-issue holsters. He sees it in the maniacal gleam in the eyes of the ambassador’s woman Friday, a near-sighted career officer who speaks seven languages, none of them really well. Muttering under her breath in ancient Greek, she plucks Stone out of a gaggle of journalists being held at bay by the Marines, plows through corridors full of milling staffers as if she is the prow of an icebreaker, barges past the civilian security contingent into the oak-paneled inner sanctum, with the limp American flag at one end, hissing hysterically, “He’s come, he’s here, I have him in tow.” Stone sees it—shoots of panic breaking through what appears to be an ordered surface—in the person of his holiness the ambassador, a tall, heavy-handed, very rich political appointee whose name appears regularly on someone or other’s ten-worst-dressed list.
