Chapter 9Colonel Donal Mathers returned to North America on a Space Service supersonic jet. He could have made it considerably quicker on one of the rocket shuttle craft, but he was in no hurry. He had got in with four or five fleet admirals and commodores and they continued the bust, which had started in Paris, all the way to Bost-Wash.
The past eight or ten days—Don had lost count—had been one long prolonged lost weekend. It had begun, of course, there in Geneva but then, one morning, he had awakened in the Nouveau Ritz in Paris. The new Ritz was situated in the same location as the old, on the Place Vendôme, and Napoleon the First still graced the top of the pillar in the square’s centre. Not that Don would have known; he had never been in Paris before.
When he awakened that day—it co
