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... everything from cell phones to washing machines.
Roscoe was very rich, very influential--"
    "And
very clumsy," Alex cut in.
    "It certainly
seems to have been a very strange and even careless accident,"
Mrs. Jones agreed. "The elevator somehow malfunctioned. Roscoe
didn't look where he was going. He fell into the shaft and died.
That's the general opinion. However, we're not so sure."
    "Why
not?"
    "First
of all, there are a number of details that don't add up. On the day
Roscoe died, a maintenance engineer by the name of Sam Green called at the
office building on Fifth Avenue where Roscoe worked. We know it was
Green--or someone who looked very much like him--because we've
seen him. They have closed-circuit security cameras, and he was filmed going
in. He said he'd come to look at a defective cable. But according to the
company that employed him, there was no defective cable and he certainly
wasn't acting under orders from them."
    "Why
don't you talk to him?"
    "We'd
like to. But Green has vanished without a trace. We think he may have been
killed. We think someone may have taken his place and somehow set up the
accident that killed Roscoe."
    Alex
shrugged. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about Mr. Roscoe. But
what's it got to do with me?"
    "I'm
coming to that." Mrs. Jones paused. "The strangest thing of
all is that the day before he died, Roscoe telephoned this office. A personal
call. He asked to speak to Alan Blunt."
    "I met
Roscoe at Cambridge University," Blunt said. "That was a long time
ago. We became friends."
    That
surprised Alex. He didn't think of Blunt as the sort of man who had
friends. "What did he say?" he asked.
    "Unfortunately,
I wasn't here to take the call," Blunt replied. "I arranged
to speak with him the following day. By that time, it was too late."
    "Do you
have any idea what he wanted?"
    "I
spoke to his assistant," Mrs. Jones said. "She wasn't
able to tell me very much, but she understood that Roscoe wanted to talk to us
about his son, He had a fourteen-year-old son, Paul Roscoe.'
    A
fourteen-year-old son. Alex was beginning to see the way things were going.
    "Paul
was his only son," Blunt explained. "I'm afraid the two of
them had a very difficult relationship. Roscoe divorced a few years ago, and
although the boy chose to live with his father, they didn't really get
along. There were the usual teenage problems, but of course, when you grow up
surrounded by millions of dollars, these problems sometimes get amplified. Paul
was doing badly at school. He was playing hooky and spending time with some
very undesirable friends. There was an incident with the New York
police--nothing serious, and Roscoe managed to hush it up--but still,
it upset him. I spoke to Roscoe from time to time. He was worried about Paul
and felt the boy was out of control. But there didn't seem to be very
much he could do."
    "So is
that what you want me for?" Alex interrupted. "You want me to meet
this boy and talk to him about his father's death?"
    "No."
Blunt shook his head and handed a file to Mrs. Jones.
    She opened
it. Alex caught a glimpse of a photograph: a dark-skinned man in military
uniform. "Remember what we told you about Roscoe," she said,
"because now I want to tell you about another man." She slid the
photograph around so that Alex could see it. "This is General Major
Viktor Ivanov. Ex-KGB. Until last December he was the head of the Foreign
Intelligence Service and probably the second or third most powerful man in Russia
after the president. But then something happened to him too. It was a boating
accident on the Black Sea. His cruiser exploded ... nobody knows
why."
    "Was he
a friend of Roscoe's?" Alex asked.
    "They
probably never met. But we have a department here that constantly monitors
world news, and their computers have thrown up a very strange coincidence.
Ivanov also had a fourteen-year-old son... Dimitry. And one thing is
certain. The young Ivanov certainly knew the young Roscoe because they went to
the same