Read Online Grand Master by D.W. Buffa - Free Book Online

lights. He remembered that somewhere up there, on a
winding street with a view that took your breath away, Bobby Hart
lived with his wife when the Senate was not in session and he could
get away. He had not talked to Hart yet, but he intended to. the
Senator had sources no one else had: his father had been with the
CIA and there were still people in the agency who told him things
they told no one else. If anyone could find out about The Four
Sisters, Hart could. Burdick shoved his hands into the pockets of
his windbreaker and, suddenly hungry, headed down the street to a
quiet looking restaurant where he could get dinner.
    A little before noon the next morning,
Burdick was back on the road, heading north along the coast, past
Santa Barbara, out onto a long flat stretch between the ocean and
the empty sun-bleached hills. The road cut inland and a hard wind
knocked the car sideways, forcing Burdick, who liked to drive fast
when he had the chance, to slow down. A few miles later, he turned
off the highway and, resuming speed, followed a county road through
the coastal range, where the only signs of civilization among the
wind bent spreading oaks were a few weathered barns that had stood
there for fifty years or more. The sense of loneliness, of mystic
solitude, made Burdick feel that he had stepped back in time,
before the age of highways and automobiles, when life moved at a
slower pace and there was more time to think. He wanted to pull off
to the side of the road, get out of the car and look around at the
endless skyline and the rugged terrain, but he glanced at the
dashboard clock and knew he had to hurry or be late.
    He came through a small coastal town, and ten
minutes later passed a sign to Vandenberg Air Force Base and was on
his way to the Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. It did not look like
most prisons. There was none of the stark sense of isolation you
felt in a place like Alcatraz, that barren rock in the middle of
the San Francisco bay; there were none of the high fortress walls,
none of the glass enclosed guard towers, of Attica or San Quentin.
It had more the aspect of a camp, a series of flat top single story
wooden buildings that could have been the barracks for an army, or
the classrooms of a school. Clumps of eucalyptus trees towered
along the side of the road, and, stretching out in the distance,
large well-tilled fields in which some of the prison’s food was
grown. Then Burdick saw it, a large blank building with scarcely
any windows, surrounded by a cage of metal fencing with double
rolls of razor sharp concertina wire on top.
    Burdick signed in at the visitor’s entrance.
After he was searched and passed through a metal detector, he was
taken, not, as he had expected, to a small narrow room where a
visitor sat on one side of a plate of thick glass and the prisoner
on the other, but to a large, empty cafeteria. The man he was there
to see was waiting for him at a round table next to a window that,
looking out onto an inner courtyard, let in the outside light.
    “Quentin Burdick of the Times!” said the
prisoner with a huge grin.
    He lumbered to his feet, placed one large
hand on Burdick’s shoulder and looked him straight in the eye as
they shook hands. For a moment, Burdick almost forgot they were in
a federal prison and not back in the committee room of the House
Ways and Means Committee.
    “How are you Congressman?” he asked with an
unexpected catch in his throat.
    Frank Morris had been one of his favorites,
colorful, profane, with an almost perfect judgment about the
strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues, and an equally sharp
instinct for just how far he could push them when he was reaching
for the kind of compromise by which, as chairman of the committee,
he could craft a budget.
    “It’s maybe not quite what I had in mind for
my retirement,” replied Morris, as the heavy lines around his aging
eyes wrinkled deeper. “But I shouldn’t complain. The food isn’t too
bad and the nights