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"I don't know whether I'll be able to do anything with what you write me, if you do write," Horace Locke said, "but I'll try." He put his hands on the arms of his chair, and Jeff knew their talk was over. "I have to keep trying," Locke said as he rose, "until they finally kick me out of here. But I'm afraid it is hopeless. If there is to be peace, it must be dictated from up there." He pointed his hand towards the old-fashioned, soaring ceiling, not self-consciously, but matter-of-fact as if of a certainty there were something up there.

Jeff could not help but look, and there was nothing up there except an embossed Great Seal, dirty and yellowing, and Jeff realized this once had been part of the suite of the Secretary of State.

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Jeff Baker spent the rest of that day completing the list of purchases recommended by the travel experts in the processing section. He had been told that you could not be certain of buying anything in Budapest--a city where once you could buy everything--that the Mission maintained no commissary, and there was no PX closer than Vienna.