He shut the door, put on his hat, crossed the room to the door leading to his private stairs, and hurried down to the street.
CHAPTER II
I
For the past three years, Sean O’Brien had been the secret political boss behind the present Administration. He had taken over at a time when the party was in very low water, and, by his enormous financial resources, had infused new life into it.
Ed Fabian, a fat, jovial, uninspired politician, had been the party’s leader when O’Brien and his millions appeared on the scene. He had accepted O’Brien’s offer of financial help without questioning where the money had come from or when would be the ultimate repayment.
The fact that O’Brien had insisted on complete anonymity should have aroused Fabian’s suspicions, but Fabian had to have money to keep his party alive, and he couldn’t afford to be curious.
Fabian now found himself a mere figurehead, but he was growing old, and had lost what fighting qualities he may have had. So long as he had the credit for running the party, he was content to take orders from O’Brien.
It would have severely jolted him if he had known that O’Brien had made his millions from large-scale, international drug trafficking. The drug traffic organization he had built up had eventually been smashed. He had always believed in being the unseen, unknown leader, and although the men who worked for him were now serving long sentences in French jails, he had managed to escape from France, taking his millions with him.
He had come to Flint City, California, to rest on his labours and enjoy his money. Pretty soon he became bored with an inactive life, and had decided to go into politics. He examined the political set-up in the town, picked on Fabian’s party as the weakest reed, moved in and bought control.
In spite of his great care to remain anonymous during his drugtrafficking dealings, he hadn’t been able to avoid contact with a few of the traffickers, and one of them, now serving a twenty years’ sentence, had talked.