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"HYPNOTISM!" snapped Joao de Sagres. Stoner made a wintry smile. "Something like that." De Sagres glared at his visitor as he peeled off his sopping, stained silk suit jacket and pulled his once-immaculate tie loose from his shirt collar. His hands still trembled, even though he was safely back in his spacious office. Through the long windows he could see the reassuring gleaming towers of Brasilia.
I am the president of the most powerful nation of Latin America, he told himself. And this man before me is a nobody. But he avoided Stoner's eyes.
He felt better, although his mind was still in turmoil. He was a smallish man, with a high forehead and round face that would have been bland except for the luxuriant black mustache and his probing dark brown eyes. This office was his sanctuary, where he could sit on his elevated platform and look down on the supplicants and schemers who came to beg favors from him.
"You tricked me," he accused.
"Not really," Stoner replied. "I showed you something very important."
"A band of savages in the Mato Grosso," de Sagres sneered.
Stoner, sitting in the leather armchair in front of the president's imposing desk, replied, "They are men. And they are in New Guinea, not the Mato Grosso."
"New Guinea! Impossible One moment we are here in my office, and then suddenly ten thousand kilometers away? And then back here again? It was a trick! Admit it!"
"I wanted to show you that even so-called primitive men have ways of preventing war. Those elders, they are called 'the Great Souls' by their people. They talked the warriors out of fighting."
De Sagres reached toward the intercom.
But Stoner suggested mildly, "Don't you think you could make your own drink?"
He pulled his hand back as if scalded. For a moment he simply sat in his high-backed swivel chair, looking troubled, undecided, almost frightened. Then he rose and walked shakily across the thick carpeting to the mirrored cabinet that served as a bar.
"If you have some Jamaican dry ginger ale," said Stoner, "I'll have it with brandy. On ice."
By the time de Sagres mixed the drinks and returned to his desk he had pulled himself together somewhat. His hands barely trembled, the ice in the glasses clinked hardly at all.
"You somehow talked your way into my private office, past all my staff and security. Why? Merely to show me a conjuring trick?"
Stoner sipped at his brandy and dry. "Not entirely."
"Then what it is that you want?"
"I want you to become one of those 'Great Souls.'"
De Sagres's dark eyes flashed. Then he threw his head back and laughed. "You want me to live naked in the jungle with those savages? No thank you!"
But Stoner was deadly serious. "I want you to prevent your military from intervening in the civil war in Venezuela."
The president's mouth dropped open.
"Your general staff thinks they are clever enough to move their troops across the border without having the Peace Enforcers intervene. Perhaps they are right. I can't predict how the Peace Enforcers will react. The political situation is murky, after all."
"We have no intention . . ."
"Don't lie to me. Your army has been supplying the Venezuelan insurgents for more than a year. It was your army's agents who fomented the civil war in the first place."
"That's not true!"
Stoner said nothing. He merely stared at de Sagres.
The president felt like a little boy under the awesome presence of a sternly uncompromising priest. "We merely . . . the Venezuelan insurrection was a genuine movement, we did not create it."
"You armed those farmers. Trained them. Led them to believe they could accomplish more with guns than they could with negotiations."
"The government of Venezuela has ignored their farmers for generations!"
"And to rectify that injustice you are helping those farmers to slaughter one another."
De Sagres ran out of arguments. He felt strangely empty, hollow. He tried to turn away from Stoner's infinite gray eyes and found that he could not.
"You must exert your authority over your own military,"
Stoner said. His voice was soft, almost a whisper, yet there was implacable iron in it.
"You don't understand how difficult that would be."
Stoner smiled slightly. "Yes I do. Would I be here otherwise? Would I have taken you to that jungle if a simple request would have been sufficient?"
"The military ..."
"The military will take over your government unless you stop them now. Their plans include not merely annexing Venezuela. They want their chief of staff to sit in your chair."
De Sagres's heart constricted with fear. He realized that he had known it all along, but had never found the courage to admit it, even to himself.
"What can I do?" he whimpered.
"Stop them now," said Stoner. "The people of Brazil will support you. The Peace Enforcers and
"But the army is too powerful."
"Only if you are too weak." Stoner leaned forward in his chair, stretching a hand over the desk to grasp de Sagres's wrist. It was like being held in an inhumanly powerful vise.
"You can become a 'Great Soul,'" Stoner said urgently. "You can save your people untold grief and pain. And the people of Venezuela, too. If you don't, the military will take over your government and you will be lost and forgotten."
De Sagres wanted to run away and hide. But Stoner had him pinned down like a helpless insect. His arm began to tingle.
"You have the power to do it," Stoner insisted. "Do you have the strength?"
The president wanted to admit that he did not, but he heard himself saying, "I can try."
Stoner's smile beamed at him. "Good! That's all that anyone can do."
"If I fail ..."
"You won't be any worse off than you are now. The army won't kill you; they'll keep you as a figurehead for their puppet government."
"A figurehead? Me? Never"
Stoner considered the Brazilian president for a long, silent, solemn moment. De Sagres felt as if his soul was being stripped bare and examined, atom by atom.
"Will you do me a favor?" Stoner asked at last.
De Sagres arched his brows It always comes down to a favor, he told himself.
But Stoner extracted a small straight pin from the breast pocket of his khaki jacket and pricked the tip of his thumb. A drop of blood welled up.
"This is as primitive as those 'Great Souls'" he said, "but I'd like to make a blood bond with you, to seal the understanding between us."
Unwilling, but unable to resist, de Sagres held out his trembling hand and allowed Stoner to grasp it in his own warm, firm grip. The touch of the pin was painless, and then they were pressing their thumbs together like little boys sharing a solemn, sacred oath.
"You have the strength to stop your military adventurers," Stoner said "You have greatness in you One day you may even win the Nobel Prize for Peace "
The president of Brazil sank back in his chair as his unannounced visitor strode purposefully to the door and disappeared from his sight.