In High Places by Arthur Hailey

Duval, whose only home was the sea, had come to the gates of Canada on the eve of Christmas.

 
    Chapter 6

The interrogation had taken almost two hours. Partway through, Dan Orliffe had repeated some of his earlier questions in different terms, seeking to trip the young stowaway into an admission or inconsistency. But the ruse failed. Except for misunderstandings of language, which were cleared up as they went along, the basic story stayed the same.
    Near the end, after a leading question phrased with deliberate inaccuracy, Duval had not answered. Instead he had turned his dark eyes upon his interrogator.
    'You trick me. You think I lie,' the stowaway said, and again the newspaperman was aware of the same unconscious dignity he had noted earlier.
    Ashamed at having his own trickery exposed, Dan Orliffe had said, 'I was just checking. I won't do it again.' And they had gone on to something else.
    Now, back at his beat-up desk in the cramped, cluttered newsroom of the Vancouver Post Dan spread out his notes and reached for a sheaf of copy paper. Shuffling in carbons, he called across to the night city editor, Ed Benedict, at the city desk.
    'Ed, it's a good story. How many words can you handle?'
    The night city editor considered. Then he called back. 'Hold it down to a thousand.'
    Pulling his chair closer to the typewriter, Dan nodded. It would do. He would have liked more but, assembled tautly, a thousand words could say a great deal.
    He began to type.

 
    Part 4
    Ottawa, Christmas Eve
    Chapter 1

At 6.15 AM on Christmas Eve Milly Freedeman was awakened by the telephone's insistent ringing in her apartment in the fashionable Tiffany Building on Ottawa Driveway. Slipping a robe of faded yellow terrycloth over silk pyjamas, she groped with her feet for the old, heel-trodden moccasins she .had kicked off the night before. Unable to locate them, the Prime Minister's personal secretary padded barefoot into the adjoining room and snapped on a light.
    Even this early, and viewed through sleepy eyes, the room which the light revealed seemed as inviting and comfortable as always. It was a far cry, Milly knew, from the chic bachelor-girl apartments so often featured in the glossy magazines. But it was a place she loved to come home to every evening, usually tired, and sinking at first into the down cushions of the big overstuffed chesterfield - the one which had given the movers so much trouble when she had brought it here from her parents' home in Toronto.
    The old chesterfield had been recovered since then, in Milly's favourite shade of green, and was flanked now by the two armchairs she had bought at an auction sale outside Ottawa - a little threadbare, but wonderfully comfortable. She kept deciding that some day soon she must have autumn-coloured chintz covers made for the chairs. The covers would go well with the apartment's walls and woodwork, painted in a warm mushroom shade. She had done the painting herself one weekend, inviting a couple of friends in for a scratch dinner, then cajoling them into helping her finish.
    On the far side of the living-room was an old rocking chair, one that she was absurdly sentimental about because she had rocked in it, daydreaming, as a child. And beside the rocking chair, on a tooled-leather coffee table for which she had paid an outrageously high price, was the telephone.
    Settling into the chair with a preliminary rock, Milly lifted the receiver. The caller was James Howden.
    'Morning, Milly,' the Prime Minister said briskly. 'I'd like a cabinet Defence Committee meeting at eleven o'clock.' He made no reference to the earliness of the call, nor did Milly expect it. She had long ago grown used to her employer's addiction to early rising.
    'Eleven this morning?' With her free hand Milly hugged the robe around her. It was cold in the apartment from a window she had left slightly open the night before.
    'That's right,' Howden said.
    'There'll be some complaining,' Milly pointed out. 'It's